The villain in the book is based on the mass-murderer Jane Toppan, whose exploits in the late nineteenth century scandalised New England. Toppan was a nurse who poisoned her patients and held them while they died for the sexual gratification that this produced. After her arrest she claimed to have killed thirty-one people using a variety of different poisons, often combining them to obscure their effects and evade detection. She was found to be insane and committed to an asylum for the rest of her life, where she became paranoid about being poisoned herself. Despite this, she lived a long life and died at the age of eighty-four.
Numerous nineteenth-century textbooks were consulted in an attempt to accurately reflect the medical thinking of the time. In trying to justify his decision to perform abdominal surgery on Sarah, Raven quotes from John Parry’s Extra-uterine Pregnancy and from Woman: Her Diseases and Remedies by Charles Meigs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
nce again, thanks to Sophie Scard, Caroline Dawnay and Charles Walker at United Agents.
Thanks to all the wonderful people at Canongate for their belief in the series and for wanting to know more about Will, Sarah, Simpson, nineteenth-century Edinburgh and chloroform.
Thanks to the National Library of Scotland for digitising the town plans and Post Office directories which played such a crucial part in the research for this book
‘Menacing, witty and ingeniously plotted’
The Times
‘Alan Parks’s excellent first novel propels him into the top class of Scottish noir authors’
The Times
‘A sexy, bravura novel . . . Wildly entertaining’
New York Times
The Art of Dying Page 35