Readers who don't get enough strong forensic medicine from the likes of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs, and who need another print fix between TV episodes of the various incarnations of CSI, will welcome this first book in a new series from a British pathologist. Beginning with the savage murder of a young female medical student who's been hung, drawn and quartered inside a famous old museum of pathology, and going on through enough autopsies and postmortem probings of body parts to fill several medical textbooks, McCarthy lays on the grisly detail, with a practicing doctor's detached eye. He's also adept at showing how the internal politics of police and pathology clash: his main character, John Eisenmenger, now in charge of the museum, is a former forensic pathologist with a checkered past—which comes out when an attractive woman lawyer, Helena Flemming, working for the family of the leading murder suspect, persuades him to redo the original autopsy. But even Flemming, a seasoned criminal lawyer obviously destined to join Eisenmenger in a second volume in the series, has her limits. "I'm not quite as clinical as you are," she tells him when he discusses details of the crime over lunch. "Perhaps in time, but for the present I'd rather eat my lunch without considering the grossest aspects of human depravity." Those with weak stomachs should take heed. (Sept. 1)
