In the cold January light filtering through grimy fanlights of Marylebone Public Library, we find Patience Worth, our reluctant detective sorting through books “inscribed with the minor violence of daily use: dog-ears, thumb prints, the occasional rust-brown stain of tea or blood.”
This atmospheric Victorian mystery follows Patience from her position behind “the barricade of the returns counter” in that “perpetual half-twilight, thick with dust motes” to the horror chambers beneath Bodiam Castle, where Dr. Ambrose Winthrope conducts his unspeakable experiments.
When London’s cemeteries are methodically desecrated and a grave digger is murdered, Patience’s uncle Frederick from Scotland Yard seeks her extraordinary analytical mind. Patience, a woman who spends her evenings examining folklore compendiums “annotated in three hands” and creating maps where “every alley and dead end is rendered in unlovely detail”, begins connecting patterns that others miss.
The trail leads to Dr. Winthrope, whose obsession with Frankenstein’s work drives him to unspeakable acts. Unlike Frankenstein’s emotional approach, Winthrope pursues reanimation with cold calculation, believing Frankenstein’s failure stemmed from “emotional collapse following successful animation, a weakness I shall not share.”
Within Bodiam Castle, once “a symbol of English heritage” now transformed into “Winthrope’s temple to cruelty”, medieval tunnels conceal chambers of scientific horror. Here, Winthrope’s specimens “all bore the marks of selection and rejection” following “the logic of the abattoir, ruthless and consistent.”
Patience must navigate this grotesque landscape where “the boundaries between the living and dead” have been “smudged out of existence,” documenting “every detail” in her notebook with “words cramped and spidery”, “the only defense against the magnitude of what she had found.”
When lightning strikes and Winthrope’s creation awakens with the collective memories of its parts, science and vengeance collide in a terrifying climax that will test whether Patience’s methodical mind can defeat a monster assembled from death itself.
This Gothic horror mystery blends elements of Frankenstein with Victorian detective fiction, creating a chilling tale of scientific obsession, grave robbery, and the dark places where ambition crosses into abomination.