Hal McDonald

1824, Victorian England
Edward Montague and Jean-Claude Legard are studying at St. Alban’s Medical School. The end result was to be able to practice medicine, but the path wasn’t easy. The study of the human body required bodies to study. The only way to get one was to dig it up.

Montague and Legard visit a cemetery, in the night, and dig up their body. It is a freshly buried lady — they expect. When they get it back to their lab, they find it is a man. This makes no sense so they set out to discover the identity of the man and what has happened to the woman who was to be in the grave.

While trying to solve the mystery, they are also dealing with their studies and keeping the police and citizenry from discovering their “corpse.”

In their search for answers, they make the acquaintance of Madeline Worthington, sister to the lady who was supposed to be in the grave. Montague takes a fancy to her, but Legare is suspicious.

Duplicity, intrigue, and greed are all parts of the story line that moves at a good pace, with characters who are interesting and humorous.… (más)

Edward Montague and Jean-Claude Legard are medical students in London. The time is the early 1800's and medical cadavers are hard to come by...legally that is...

After hiring a young resurrectionist, the doctors in training learn that the robbed grave was host to the wrong body. They take it upon themselves to discover who this body belonged to and where the original grave owner has gotten to.

This is the premise of The Anatomists, from author Hal McDonald.

The Anatomists reads as a Sherlock Holmes type of mystery, with roommate Jean-Claude Legard playing Holmes against Edward Montague's Watson. While this works for the era of the story, it has the unfortunate effect of the reader being told what happened as opposed to discovering what happens.

The plot, itself, is quite intricate with many twists and turns along the way to its conclusion, some that are given away a bit to early and many that are surmised far to easily by the Legard character who often decides upon the "answer" with no lead-in to how he could possibly have come to that conclusion.

All that being said, The Anatomists is a fun story if the reader can take himself back in time a bit as a reader and imagine reading this book in the era the story takes place as opposed to 2008.… (más)

Story:
Jean and Edward are your typical medical students circa the early 1800's in London. Having studied for some time at St. Albans medical school they have come to the point of having to do their own "hands on" research. Unfortunatley in this time there is no such thing as medically donated cadavers and they have to procure a recentley deceased body from the local "resurrectionist". They employ a local lad who does the deed but they notice that the body they received died by someone's hand and not natural causes. In an attempt to bring what they thing think is a common thug to justice, they track down the man that found the body for them and and find themselves in the middle of mystery that could leave them with a case of rigor mortis if they aren't very careful.
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To start off I did enjoy this book by the end of it. It was just the getting there that was the problem. The characters talk like they proably would have talked back them, very verbose, very big words thrown in there and a *lot* of speculation back and forth between the two main characters. The idea (and I'm sure it was the point) is that this is a slightly more moderen sherlock and watson, which can be slightly annoying sometimes when it gets to be obvious that Jean is the fast / smart one and Edward is the slow / everyman one. For the most part it works and there a bunch of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing and the last two chapters make up for the long road it took to get there. I would recommend this book to those who like the History in their Historical mystery books and for those like their mysteries to have a lot of twists and turns in them.
m.a.c… (más)