The Unquiet Heart

Set in Edinburgh in 1893, Welsh’s richly evocative second Sarah Gilchrist mystery (after 2017’s The Wages of Sin) finds headstrong Sarah, a first-year medical student, trying to balance family expectations and her own desire to become a doctor. Sarah’s parents will pay her medical school fees on one condition: she must marry Miles Greene, the colorless second son of a respectable family who agrees to overlook Sarah’s scandalous past (she was once sexually assaulted). Sarah may not want to marry Miles, but when he’s arrested for his father’s murder, she’s unwilling to let him take the blame. In order to prove his innocence, she enlists the help of her volatile professor, Gregory Merchiston, to uncover the real killer. The mystery is secondary to Welsh’s depiction of the plight of intelligent, ambitious women in 19th-century Britain, long before anyone dreamed of #MeToo, when a spotless reputation and a suitable marriage was the end all and be all for a woman, her own wishes and desires be damned. Sarah’s plight is an infuriating one indeed, and readers will cheer her every step of the way. Agent: Laura Macdougall, Tibor Jones & Assoc. (U.K.). (Feb.)