The Resurrectionist – The instant bestseller based on true crimes in Georgian Edinburgh

About this book

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Set in 1828, The Resurrectionist follows James Willoughby, a young man arriving in Edinburgh with little money and an ambition to study surgery. Entry to the city’s leading anatomy schools comes at a price he cannot afford, forcing him to seek work wherever it can be found.

He finds an opportunity through Nye MacKinnon, a confident and charismatic dissectionist who introduces James to the hidden economy beneath respectable medicine. Their route into academic success runs through graveyards, where the Resurrectionists steal newly buried bodies and sell them on for study. What begins as necessity soon draws James into a dangerous world of rivalry, violence and moral compromise.

As competing gangs fight for dominance, the partnership between James and Nye deepens into something more personal. Against the backdrop of dissecting rooms and moonlit cemeteries, desire and danger become inseparable. The Resurrectionist is a dark historical novel about ambition, transgression and love found in the most unlikely of places.