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1851: Third in the Jem Flockhart series
1851: Third in the Jem Flockhart series
Summoned to the riverside by the desperate, scribbled note of an old friend, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain find themselves on board the seamen’s floating hospital, an old hulk known only as The Blood, where prejudice, ambition and murder seethe beneath a veneer of medical respectability.
On shore, a young woman, a known prostitute, is found drowned in a derelict boatyard. A man leaps to his death into the Thames, driven mad by poison and fear. The events are linked – but how? Courting danger in the opium dens and brothels of the waterfront, certain that the Blood lies at the heart of the puzzle, Jem and Will embark on a quest to uncover the truth. In a hunt that takes them from the dissecting tables of a private anatomy school to the squalor of the dock-side mortuary, they find themselves involved in a dark and terrible mystery.
There was a real hospital called St Saviour’s and it was located at 10 Osnaburgh Street, Regent’s Park, NW1. This one was demolished in 1962 but the one in the novel will live on in your mind and nightmares.
“St Saviour’s Infirmary awaits demolition. Within its stinking wards and cramped corridors the doctors bicker and fight.”
Destination/location: London Author/guide: E S Thomson Departure Time: 1851
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