Curator of Ashes

Edinburgh, 1874. Dr. Mercy Landseer has been made curator of the Anatomical Museum, a post nobody wanted, because her predecessor disappeared while cataloguing a Highland collection of fire-damaged objects. She begins the inventory. A pocket watch. A christening gown. A set of surgical tools. Sixty artifacts, sixty houses, sixty fires — all on the same night of the year, every year, for six decades. Each fire killed exactly one person. Each death was followed by an inheritance. The current laird of Ashmount is her patron. He is charming. He has promised the museum a new wing. The catalogue implicates him regardless. Mercy is a registrar. She does not decide guilt. She records provenance. A horror mystery of Victorian Edinburgh, of a museum that keeps everything, and of an inventory that was never meant to be completed.