“Man’s inhumanity to
man / makes countless thousands mourn!” (Burns)
The year is 1858, high summer. Temperatures in London are soaring, and the
city’s beleaguered residents are suffocating under the weight of odious vapours
rising out of the Thames - a river so polluted that the only life it can
support is of the bacterial kind. In the
morgue of St Bart’s Hospital, Smithfield, the resident pathologist, Professor
Hatton, and his assistant, Monsieur Roumande, are knee-deep in diseased-ravaged
corpses, a consequence of the cholera epidemic sweeping through London’s slums.
But worse is to come.
Enlisted by Scotland Yard to help investigate a string of strange
murders, Hatton and Roumande find themselves exposed to an altogether different
kind of toxicity, more insidious than cholera, and almost as deadly. Drawn into a poisonous atmosphere of
political unrest and revolutionary fervour, the pair follow a green-ribboned and
bloody trail from the affluent suburbs of northwest London to the heaving rookeries
of St Giles, where poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, driven from their
homeland by famine and British oppression, harbour a deep-rooted desire for
revenge. Both men will need to push the
boundaries of their fledgling science - forensics - to the very limit if they are
to have any hope of halting the terrifying killing spree.
In The Devil’s Ribbon,
the second in the Hatton and Roumande series of murder mysteries, D.E. Meredith
deftly weaves a suspenseful and multi-faceted tale of political intrigue,
abuses of power, long-held secrets, and insatiable bloodlust. Set just a decade
after the devastating Great Famine in Ireland, and featuring a host of
convincing characters, the story draws its inspiration from the long and
bedevilled conflict between Ireland and the rest of Britain, an ugly and
long-running drama from which neither side emerged unsullied.
The Devil’s Ribbon reveals
the author’s remarkable insight into an emotive, highly-charged and painful
period of Anglo-Irish history. Painstakingly researched, this book is more thought-provoking
than a Victorian crime novel has any right to be.
“Revenge is a wild
kind of justice.”
The Devil's Ribbon by D.E. Meredith is published by Allison & Busby. Out in hardback and as ebook now. The first Hatton and Roumande mystery, Devoured, is also available.
