A compelling new series about Dr Dody McCleland, the first female autopsy surgeon. Murder treats everyone equally... A woman. A doctor. A beastly science. At the turn of the twentieth century, London's political climate is in turmoil, as women fight for the right to vote. Dody McCleland has her own battles to fight. As England's first female autopsy surgeon, she must prove herself as she also proves that murder treats everyone equally... After a heated women's rights rally turns violent, an innocent suffragette is found murdered. When she examines the body, Dody is shocked to realise that the victim was a friend of her sister - fuelling her determination to uncover the cause of the protester's suspicious death. For Dody, gathering clues from a body is often easier than handling the living - especially Chief Detective Inspector Matthew Pike. Pike is looking to get to the bottom of this case but has a hard time trusting anyone - including Dody. Determined to earn Pike's trust and to find the killer, Dody will have to sort through real and imagined secrets. But if she's not careful, she may end up on her own examination table ...

In the scorching summer of 1911, London is a hotbed of political activity as women fight for their equality and Germany starts to pose a dangerous threat. But Dody McCleland, England’s first female autopsy surgeon, has more immediate concerns—such as finding out who’s trying to frame her for murder… A distraught scullery maid appears at Dody’s Women’s Clinic begging for an abortion. It turns out she has a case of lead poisoning, which Dody believes she took to induce a miscarriage. Instead of reporting the girl to the authorities, Dody decides to council her and prescribes an antidote. But days later, the maid is found dead from a bungled criminal abortion—and the coroner receives a series of anonymous letters accusing Dody of the crime. Now, Dody has to find out who has framed her for the maid’s murder—or else she’ll be embroiled in a criminal trial. Chief Inspector Pike is working undercover on another case, playing the piano for an exotic dancer who may be spying for the Germans, but when he hears Dody’s in trouble, he insists on lending a hand. But as Pike and Dody are about to discover, she’s not only fighting for her career, but for her life, too…

'If a black dog appears along the old corpse way, the route a funeral procession takes to the churchyard, it is thought to be escorting the dead soul to the afterlife. A black dog sighting without a funeral procession, however, is supposed to foreshadow death.' For Doctor Dody McCleland, the unearthing of an ancient skeleton in a dry riverbed is a welcome break from the monotony of chaperoning her younger sister at a country house near the isolated hamlet of Piltdown. But when she begins her analysis of the bones, Britain's first female autopsy surgeon discovers they are much more recent - and they are the result of murder. With Chief Inspector Matthew Pike's help Dody begins to investigate. Soon she finds herself pitted against ugly traditionalism, exploitation, spectral dogs, a ghostly hunt and a series of events that not only threaten her belief in scientific rationalism, but threaten her life itself.

The fourth engrossing mystery in the acclaimed Dr Dody McCleland series, featuring Britain's first female autopsy surgeon. To Doctor Dody McCleland, the gruesome job of dealing with the results of an explosion at the Necropolis Railway Station is testing enough. But when her suffragette sister Florence is implicated in the crime, matters worsen and Dody finds her loyalty cruelly divided. Can she choose between love for her sister and her secret love for Chief Inspector Matthew Pike, the investigating officer on the case? Dody and Pike's investigations lead them to a women's rest home where patients are not encouraged to read or think and where clandestine treatments and operations are conducted in an unethical and inhumane manner. Together Dody and Pike must uncover such foul play before their secret liaisons become public knowledge - and before Florence becomes the rest home's next victim.

The fifth in the Dr Dodi McCleland series - Agatha Christie meets Phryne Fisher Forensic doctor Dody McCleland is horrified when the seemingly dead body of a well-dressed woman she has just sliced with her scalpel bolts upright with a howl. Dody has heard of bodies frozen into a false death before but never come face to face with the phenomenon. She feels a terrible debt - and a strange connection - to this woman, discovered incongruously near the notorious Anchor and Whistle public house. Yet Dody is puzzled: how did such a woman of such means and intelligence come to be left for dead in the icy cold of this unsavoury district? Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Pike has a gang of jewel thieves with a trail of murder behind them bailed up in a burning building. When one of the gang escapes, and the remainder are found assassinated at close range, it is clear the modus operandi of the chief suspect has brutally shifted. Then Pike discovers both that the king has an interest in the gang's stolen jewels and that his superior is suspected of corruption. Threats to his career and his relationship with Dody further intensify an already delicate situation. Join Dody and Pike as they work to find out who is behind the carnage, discover who Dody's new friend really is, and if there's any hope of them ever sharing a future together.