‘No one likes death. It just happens to be our business.’
Nobody who meets Dr Jack Cuthbert forgets him. Tall, urbane, brilliant but damaged, this Scottish pathologist who works with Scotland Yard is the best the new DCI has seen. But Cuthbert is a man
who lives with secrets, and he still battles demons brought back from the trenches.
When not one but two corpses are discovered in a London park in 1929, Cuthbert must use every tool at his disposal to solve the mystery of their deaths. In the end, the horrifying truth is more shocking than even he could have imagined.
As he works the case, Cuthbert realises that history rarely stays in the past. And even in the final moments, there is still one last revelation that leaves him reeling.
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Allan Gaw is a Scot who lives and works near Glasgow. He studied medicine and is a pathologist by training but a writer by inclination. Having worked in the NHS and universities in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and the US, he now devotes his time to writing.
Most of his published work to date is non-fiction. These include textbooks and regular magazine articles on topics as diverse as the thalidomide story, the medical challenges of space travel and the
medico-legal consequences of the Hillsborough disaster.
More recently, he has been writing short stories, novels and poetry. He has won the UK Classical Association Creative Writing Competition, the International Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the International Globe Soup 7-day Writing Challenge and was runner-up in the Glencairn Glass/Bloody Scotland Short Crime Fiction Competition. He has also had prose published in the literary journal, From Glasgow to Saturn and anthologies from the Edinburgh Literary Salon and Clan Destine Press in Australia. His poetry has been published by Dreich, Soor Ploom Press and Black Bough Poetry. His debut poetry collection, Love & Other Diseases, was published in 2023 by Seahorse Publications.
The Silent House of Sleep is his debut novel and is the first in the Dr Jack Cuthbert Mystery series.
You can read more about him and his work at his website
My thoughts: this was really good, slightly creepy – the method of murder was very and the killer was too.
Haunted by his experiences in WW1, Dr Cuthbert was an interesting protagonist. He’s a brilliant doctor, up on all the latest forensic technology (bearing in mind what they knew was very new – and years before DNA sequencing etc), with an inquisitive mind and helpfully for this case, a working knowledge of Latin.
I won’t reveal the ghoulish method of murder, but it is pretty nasty. So much so that it leaves DI Mowbray and his team completely at sea. Thankfully Cuthbert can provide a little information and that sets the police on the right path. But the doctor wants to see this one through – and it turns out that there is a connection to him, one that adds to his trauma.
I hope that this becomes a series, with Cuthbert and Mowbray becoming better friends and colleagues, and Cuthbert finding some happiness in his life, even if it is by solving gruesome killings.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 