Take a sneak peek at Ghastly Business, by Louise Levene
Ghastly Business conjures the world of interwar London with gleeful vigour: a time when a woman’s body was only mentioned if someone had dismembered it; when the scars of the Great War were still fresh and when a pretty young bluestocking needed to tread very carefully in order to avoid becoming yet another of its casualties.
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1929. A girl is strangled in a London alley, the mangled corpse of a peeping Tom is found in a railway tunnel and the juicy details of the latest trunk murder are updated hourly in fresh editions of the evening papers.
Into this insalubrious world steps Dora Strang, a doctor’s daughter with an unmaidenly passion for anatomy. Denied her own medical career, she moves into lodgings with a hilarious, insecticidal landlady and begins life as filing clerk to the country’s pre-eminent pathologist, Alfred Kemble.
Dora is thrilled by the grisly post-mortems and the headline-grabbing court cases and more fascinated still by the pathologist himself: an enigmatic war hero with bottle-green eyes and an air of sardonic glamour – the embodiment of all her girlish fantasies. But Dora’s job holds more than a few surprises, not least of which is finding herself frequently under the watchful gaze – and occasionally wandering hands – of the distinguished Dr Kemble. As things take a distinctly ghastly turn, both in one of the department’s major cases and in Dora’s own life, the newspaper reporters sharpen their pencils in morbid anticipation … But can the impressionable Miss Strang emerge unscathed?
Simply send an email to sneakpeek@bloomsbury.com by the 6th June and ten winners will be selected at random. Please include your name and address so they can send you a copy if you win.
June 22nd, 2011 at 2:36 pm
The book trailer for Ghastly Business has been posted on Bloomsbury’s YouTube channel today, to give you a taster for this brilliant new novel by Louise Levene: