The Corpse Queen
1850s Philadelphia. After her friend’s body is found in the river, fellow orphan Molly believes the man her friend was seeing, a medical student named Edgar, is to blame. Molly is sent away to stay with an estranged aunt who asks Molly to perform a secret nightly task: obtaining corpses for medical students. Molly realizes this is her best chance to find Edgar and accepts. When other women begin to go missing and later turn up mutilated, Molly suspects Edgar is more dangerous than anyone suspected.
Molly is in her friend’s grave when the book opens. Stage: set. Even metaphors are thought of in macabre medical references: “the sky was a festering wound, clotted with clouds.” Molly’s journey as she finds her own way is captivating. By day, she rubs elbows with the upper crust of Philadelphia society while by night she’s gathering bodies.
A couple of times, a character takes off a dress by pulling it over her head. Dresses were commonly of two pieces in this era in addition to the crinoline and petticoats underneath. I also had concerns about the 12–17 years reading age. Molly’s closest friend works upstairs at a place called “The Red Carousel.” While there, Molly participates in using a whip against a man. Additionally, the interludes introduce a woman who’s killed a man with some non-subtle sensual references to her previous affair.
Molly’s struggles to define herself in a man’s world are the heart of this novel. The story is peppered with side characters that add varying degrees of depth and empathy to Molly’s world. The controversy of obtaining bodies is wrestled with and compared to how poor people and women are treated by society in life. This is a dark, atmospheric, and tense medical thriller that hooked me from page one.
