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Informationen zum Autor C. S. Harris Klappentext "The dead man smelled like fish. Rotting fish. Pale, bloodless, and faceless, he lay on the stained granite slab in the center of Paul Gibson's ancient stone outbuilding, filling the small room with a foul stench. But then, bodies pulled from the Thames did have a nasty tendency to reek of fish. Fish, brine, tar, and-if it was warm and they'd been in the water long enough-decay. The outbuilding stood at the base of a newly planted garden that stretched out behind the medieval Tower Hill house where Gibson kept his surgery, and he paused now in the doorway to suck in one last breath of fresh, rose-scented air before entering the room. The morning was damp and chilly, the sky a low, menacing gray, the ache from Gibson's truncated left leg sharp enough that he winced as he limped forward. Irish by birth, he was thinner than he should have been and younger than he looked, his dark hair already heavily laced with gray, the long grooves that bracketed his mouth dug deep. Pain had a way of doing that to a man-pain and the opium he used to control it"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 London Tuesday, 13 June 1815 T he dead man smelled like fish. Rotting fish. Pale, bloodless, and faceless, he lay on the stained granite slab in the center of Paul Gibson's ancient stone outbuilding, filling the small room with a foul stench. But then, bodies pulled from the Thames did have a nasty tendency to reek of fish. Fish, brine, tar, and-if it was warm and they'd been in the water long enough-decay. The outbuilding stood at the base of a newly planted garden that stretched out behind the medieval Tower Hill house where Gibson kept his surgery, and he paused now in the doorway to suck in one last breath of fresh, rose-scented air before entering the room. The morning was damp and chilly, the sky a low, menacing gray, the ache from Gibson's truncated left leg sharp enough that he winced as he limped forward. Irish by birth, he was thinner than he should have been and younger than he looked, his dark hair already heavily laced with gray, the long grooves that bracketed his mouth dug deep. Pain had a way of doing that to a man-pain and the opium he used to control it. There'd been a time not so long ago when he'd served as a surgeon with His Majesty's 25 Light Dragoons, honing his understanding of the human body on the bloody battlefields of Europe. Then a French cannonball tore away the lower part of his leg, and though he'd tried to keep going, in the end the phantom pains from that vanished limb became too much. And so he'd come here, to London, to open this humble surgery in the shadow of the Tower, share his knowledge of anatomy at the city's teaching hospitals, and conduct postmortems like this one for the local officials. But lately there were times, such as this morning, when the demands of even that simple routine could come close to overwhelming him. The lingering effects of yesterday's generous dose of opium had left him shaky and clumsy, and he found it took him three tries with a flint before he managed to light a lantern against the gloom and hang it from the chain suspended over the stone slab. The swaying golden light played over the ghostly flesh and shattered face of the unidentified corpse before him and cast macabre shadows across the room's bare stone walls in a way he did not like. Tall, well-formed, and probably somewhere in his thirties, the dead man had been delivered just after dawn by a couple of constables from the Thames River Police. "An East Indiaman in the Pool pulled him up with their anchor," one of the constables had said when they heaved the half-naked body up onto Gibson's slab. "Otherwise he probably wouldn't have surfaced for another two or three days-if ever." "Who took his clothes?" asked Gibson. "Whoever tossed him in the river, I s'pose," said the older of the tw...
