Allan
Gaw is a Scottish physician turned writer. Most of his career has been in
academic medicine as a pathologist and clinical researcher. He worked for the
National Institute for Health Research at the University of Leeds and was
Professor & Director of the Clinical Research Facility at Queen’s
University Belfast. He previously worked at Glasgow University and the
University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas as well as the NHS. In addition
to his twenty-five non-fiction books, he has published over two hundred
articles. He now focuses on poetry and fiction. The
Silent House of Sleep (SA Press, 2023) is his debut novel and is the
first in a new historical medical mystery series.
Told through dual timelines in the early days of
World War I and in the late 1920s, this first book about Dr. John Archibald
Cuthbert, senior pathologist at St. Thomas’s Hospital and senior police surgeon
with the Metropolitan Police, shows his path to becoming the pre-eminent pathologist
of his day and his work on a particularly puzzling homicide case.
Cuthbert’s brutal experiences in the trenches and
the hospital tents of France are realistically and graphically related, along
with the resultant PTSD that afflicts Cuthbert in the present. Cuthbert’s
hard-won knowledge informed his later work as a pathologist and a police
surgeon. Gaw’s notes show he used a number of primary sources in writing these
chapters, framing them with the immediacy, the terror, and the misery of the battlefield.
In this first investigation Freddie Dawson had been
missing for three months by the time his body was found. His parents had given
up on seeing him alive again and the police had stopped looking for him. The
post-mortem showed his remains were interred with those of another corpse. The
description of the painstaking autopsy is clinical in its detail.
Parallel to the forensic analysis, Detective
Inspector Franklin interviewed again everyone who might have seen Dawson before
he disappeared and combed the missing person records to identify the other
corpse. Franklin’s thorough police work and Cuthbert’s scientific research meld
into a complicated explanation for the two deaths, a particularly vicious one that
will make some readers queasy.
Gaw has created an original character in Cuthbert
and has given him some fine support in his Belgian housekeeper and his eager
assistant with the airhead fiancé. Both of these individuals offer potential
for intriguing subplots in future books. Well-written and structured, the dual
timeline was handled skillfully. I skipped some of the medical detail as it was
TMI; Gaw never lets the reader forget that he is a doctor. Fans of Kathy Reich
and Charles Todd will be especially interested in this series.
·
Publisher: SA Press (November 30,
2023)
·
Language: English
·
Paperback: 298 pages
·
ISBN-10: 0956324266
·
ISBN-13: 978-0956324269
Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3uBElGX
Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2024
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.
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