Mrs Burke & Mrs Hare
The names of 19th-century body-snatchers Burke and Hare are well known, but Sloan’s fascinating and page-turning novel looks at the women behind them – their wives.
William Hare’s wife, Lucky, realises there’s money to be made in the trade of corpses being dug up in Edinburgh’s cemeteries, to meet the unquenchable needs of doctors studying the new science of anatomy. Lucky runs a boarding house, and when a lodger dies of natural causes, she, her husband and his friend William Burke decide to supply the corpse to surgeon Robert Knox. Knox is delighted with their delivery – the body is far less decomposed than those that have been buried – and hopes for more. This leads the trio, and then Burke’s reluctant wife, Nelly, to become embroiled in murder. After all, who will miss the drifting lowlifes of Edinburgh’s backstreets when they are lured to Lucky’s boarding house and plied with whisky?
After at least sixteen murders the group make a mistake and are caught. The trial is dramatic, but the women go free. Years later, journalist Duncan Fletcher hears that Lucky and Nelly have been seen and decides to pursue the story.
Sloan has a gripping and logical theory about what happened to the women, in a novel that focuses on poverty, greed and the dark side of humanity. The degrees of guilt felt by the killers are well explored, and there are a couple of breathtaking and ironical moments around their fate. Touchingly, the novel is dedicated to the forgotten victims of Burke and Hare. A violent, chilling and absorbing read from the author of The Edinburgh Skating Club.
