Scott Elliott
The Galvanic Mysteries
Historical detective fiction with an uncanny edge, set in Victorian London.
The Setting
Fenwick's London
London, November 1867. Thomas Fenwick works from Shadwell and knows the wharves and warehouses of Wapping. The docks keep the city working, but a missing labourer can attract less attention than a delayed cargo.
His investigations begin among people the authorities are quick to dismiss. Casual work and crowded lodgings leave them vulnerable to a promise of pay or a place out of the cold. Behind warehouse shutters, experiments continue through the night.
The Investigations
Science and the uncanny
A murder investigation can lead to a laboratory, but finding the machinery does not explain everything. Fenwick can draw fog around himself. Inessa Volkova can gather shadows. Their gifts have costs they cannot ignore.
The Galvanic Mysteries draws on nineteenth-century batteries, telegraphy, and experiments with electricity and the body. The history informs the setting; the Circle's apparatus and its extraction of the vital spark belong to the fiction.
Fenwick follows evidence even when it unsettles his understanding of the world. He must also judge whom to trust when his allies have reasons to conceal what they know.
The Casebook
The Books
Book One · Releases
Mortal Current
A branded body on the Wapping mudflats brings Fenwick onto the Circle's trail. A Russian exile and a street boy hold parts of the answer, but the boy may be the Circle's next victim.