The Coroner’s Daughter

One Dublin One Book 2023

About the book

1816 was the year without a summer. A rare climatic event has brought frost to July, and a lingering fog casts a pall over Dublin – a city stirred by zealotry and civil unrest, torn between evangelical and rationalist dogma.

Amid the disquiet, a young nursemaid in a pious household conceals a pregnancy and then murders her newborn. Rumours swirl about the identity of the child’s father, but before an inquest can be held, the maid is found dead. When Abigail Lawless, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the city coroner, by chance discovers a message from the maid’s seducer, she is drawn into a world of hidden meanings and deceit.

An only child, Abigail has been raised amid the books and instruments of her father’s grim profession. Pushing against the restrictions society places on a girl her age, she pursues an increasingly dangerous investigation. As she leads us through dissection rooms and dead houses, gothic churches and elegant ballrooms, watching from the shadows is a sinister figure whom she believes has killed twice already, and is waiting to kill again. . . Determined, resourceful and intuitive, and more than just a dutiful daughter or society débutante, Abigail Lawless emerges as a memorable young sleuth operating at the dawn of forensic science.