Book description
1929. A girl is strangled in
a London alley, the mangled corpse of a peeping Tom is found in a railway
tunnel and the juicy details of the latest trunk murder are updated
hourly in
fresh editions of the evening papers.
Into this insalubrious world steps Dora Strang, a doctor's daughter with an
unmaidenly passion for anatomy. Denied her own medical career, she moves into
lodgings with a hilarious, insecticidal landlady and begins life as filing
clerk to the country's pre-eminent pathologist, Alfred Kemble.
Dora is thrilled by the grisly post-mortems and the headline-grabbing court
cases and more fascinated still by the pathologist himself: an enigmatic war
hero with bottle-green eyes and an air of sardonic glamour - the
embodiment of
all her girlish fantasies. But Dora's job holds more than a few
surprises, not
least of which is finding herself frequently under the watchful gaze - and
occasionally wandering hands - of the distinguished Dr Kemble. As things
take a
distinctly ghastly turn, both in one of the department's major cases and in
Dora's own life, the newspaper reporters sharpen their pencils in morbid
anticipation … But can the impressionable Miss Strang emerge unscathed?
Ghastly Business
conjures the world of
interwar London with gleeful vigour: a time when a woman's body was only
mentioned if someone had dismembered it; when the scars of the Great War were
still fresh and when a pretty young bluestocking needed to tread very carefully
in order to avoid becoming yet another of its casualties. Louise
Levene is the author
of A Vision of Loveliness
, a BBC Book at Bedtime. She has been the dance
critic of the Sunday Telegraph
since 1998 but has also been an
advertising copywriter, a window dresser, a radio presenter, an office cleaner,
a crossword editor, a college professor and a saleslady. She lives in London
with her husband and two children.
