A young medical student named Fettes is assisting his professor in procuring cadavers to be dissected by his fellow students. He knows many of the bodies that are sold to him were stolen from graves—but he needs his job and keeps his silence.
To remain silent, however, is to invite worse trouble. Late one night there is a knock at the door and another cadaver is delivered to Fettes—one he recognizes. It’s Jane Galbraith, a woman Fettes had seen alive and well only a day before.
Suspecting Galbraith was a victim of foul play, Fettes confronts his colleague, who warns him to continue keeping silent. Once again Fettes obeys, finding himself drawn inexorably deeper and deeper into a sinister swamp of deceit, lies, and murder.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but was finally allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted forcibly against the Presbyterianism of both his city's professional classes and his devout parents, but the influence of Calvinism on his childhood informed the fascination with evil that is so powerfully explored in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson suffered from a severe respiratory disease from his twenties onwards, leading him to settle in the gentle climate of Samoa with his American wife, Fanny Osbourne.
David Ault is a voiceover artist, narrator, private tutor, and science communicator based in Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.