"The dead man smelled like fish. Rotting fish. Pale, bloodless, and faceless, he lay on the stained granite slab in the center of Paul Gibson's ancient stone outbuilding, filling the small room with a foul stench. But then, bodies pulled from the Thames did have a nasty tendency to reek of fish. Fish, brine, tar, and-if it was warm and they'd been in the water long enough-decay. The outbuilding stood at the base of a newly planted garden that stretched out behind the medieval Tower Hill house where Gibson kept his surgery, and he paused now in the doorway to suck in one last breath of fresh, rose-scented air before entering the room. The morning was damp and chilly, the sky a low, menacing gray, the ache from Gibson's truncated left leg sharp enough that he winced as he limped forward. Irish by birth, he was thinner than he should have been and younger than he looked, his dark hair already heavily laced with gray, the long grooves that bracketed his mouth dug deep. Pain had a way of doing that to a man-pain and the opium he used to control it"-- Provided by publisher. When the mutilated corpse of Major Miles Sedgewick surfaces in the Thames, Sebastian St. Cyr, to prove the innocence of his oldest and dearest friend, Irish surgeon Paul Gibson, and Gibson's lover Alexi, delves into Sedgewick's life and finds the list of people who wanted him dead growing at every turn.
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