Mortal Current

Publication forthcoming

London. November, 1867.

The galvanic age has arrived. Somewhere in the fog, someone has learned to harvest the spark that powers the living.

Thomas Fenwick doesn't believe in the supernatural. Twenty years navigating the Metropolitan Police — and the worse geography of human nature — have left him with a finely calibrated contempt for easy answers and a working knowledge of exactly what people will do when they think no one is watching.

When a body washes up on the Thames mudflats with a burn pattern pressed into the sternum — deliberate, precise, like nothing a tavern brawl or a river crossing leaves behind — Fenwick takes the case as a favour. When a second body follows, and then a third, each bearing the same charred mark, it stops being a favour and starts being something he can't put down. Then one body turns up with something the others didn't: a brass disc, still pressed against the skin. Someone forgot to take it back. Fenwick intends to find out who.

The trail leads him from Shadwell's dockside taverns to the gas-lit drawing rooms of the West End — and deeper still, toward a secret society calling itself the Circle, experimenting with galvanic science at the edge of what should be possible. They believe they have found a way to siphon the vital spark — the bioelectric force that animates the living — from one body to another.

Fenwick brings two allies into this: a young Russian exile who fled St. Petersburg with nothing but her father's stolen secrets and a gift for vanishing into shadow; and a ginger-haired urchin who knows every alley in Whitechapel better than the peelers who patrol them. Neither is what they appear. Neither is he.

The fog remembers everything. Fenwick just has to survive long enough to listen.