Dark Asylum

Starred review from September 4, 2017
Thomson’s captivating second Victorian mystery featuring apothecary Jem Flockhart (after 2016’s Beloved Poison) showcases the author’s talent for creating creepy and rewarding plot twists. Jem’s backstory is appropriately Dickensian: “My mother died as I was born; my father hanged for a crime he did not commit. I am their only surviving child—a daughter, whose identity my father swapped at birth for my dead twin brother’s.” Disguised as a man, Jem lives above her apothecary shop near London’s Angel Meadow Asylum, “a dark, square-shouldered hulk,” which becomes the scene of a gruesome murder. Dr. Rutherford,
the asylum’s sadistic superintendent, is found lying in a pool of blood with calipers used to take phrenological measurements buried in his brain, his ears missing, and his lips sewn shut. Jem chooses to search for the killer herself, aided by her closest friend and roommate, Will Quartermain. Thomson makes the most of the asylum as a setting, eerily conveying its claustrophobic confines. Agent: Jenny Brown, Jenny Brown Associates (U.K.).

October 1, 2017
This is a descent into madness, as it was understood and treated in Victorian London. In 1852, apothecary Jem Flockhart and her companion, architect Will Quartermain, are called to the scene of the brutal murder of Dr. John Rutherford at Angel Meadow Asylum. Rutherford's head was pierced with an instrument, and his ears cut off and stuffed in his mouth, whichalong with his eyeshad been sewn shut. This death of a phrenologist with a sordid past who treated patients by slicing off parts of their brains is not widely mourned, but then Dr. Tom Golspie, a more humane practitioner, is killed in the same manner. Interspersed with the quest by Jem and Will to solve the crimes are the accounts of an unnamed murderess, along with Jem's feelings as a woman who lives as a man with a facial birthmark that makes him an ugly man but would make her a hideous woman. In this sequel to Beloved Poison (2016), Thomson vividly portrays the wretchedness of various venues, from slums to prisons to brothels. A darkly atmospheric historical mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)