The anatomy of deception - Lawrence Goldstone

Philadelphia, 1889

In the morgue of the city hospital, physicians uncover the corpse of a beautiful young woman. What they see takes their breath away.

Within days, one of the surgeons, Ephraim Carroll, strongly suspects that he knows the woman's identity. His investigations take him from the bloody and brutal medical world in which he practices and into the drawing rooms of Philadelphia's high society where he soon learns that nothing - and no one - is what they seem.

Plunged into a maze of deception and deadly secrets, Carroll is forced to choose between exposing a killer, undoing a terrible wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting the future of medicine itself.

Set in a world in which aspirin had not been invented, abortion was illegal, and pregnancy could result in agonising death, The Anatomy of Deception is an intriguing and richly atmospheric blend of history, early forensic science and knife-edge suspense.