Edinburgh, 1851.
Octavia Rooke has spent her life among surgical blades, anatomical drawings, and instruments designed for men whose expertise earns them titles and respect. She possesses no such authority. Yet when she is allowed to examine the body of a woman supposedly dead of consumption, Octavia sees what the physicians around her have missed.
The body tells a different story.
Before Octavia can prove it, the corpse disappears.
Her search leads her through Edinburgh after dark and into a burial ground, where she finds Mara Venn opening the dead woman's grave.
Mara is everything Octavia is not: irreverent, resourceful, intimately acquainted with the city's hidden routes, unofficial trades, debts, servants, undertakers, and secrets. She was paid to recover the body. She was not expecting company.
Neither woman was expecting the coffin to contain two corpses.
Both dead women have burial records. Both supposedly died under different circumstances. And as Octavia reconstructs what happened to their bodies while Mara traces the people who profited from their deaths, they discover something far more dangerous than a falsified burial.
For years, a secret network has helped desperate women escape violent husbands, controlling guardians, and lives from which the law offers little protection—by allowing them to die on paper and begin again elsewhere.
Someone has discovered the scheme.
And someone is using it to hide real murders.
To expose the killer, Octavia and Mara may have to destroy the very deception that saved innocent women. But as suspicion turns into fascination and fascination into a desire neither can safely name, the investigation becomes personal in ways neither of them anticipated.
In a city where respectable institutions guard their reputations more fiercely than they guard the vulnerable, the dead may reveal what happened.
The living must decide what the truth is worth.
The Women Who Were Buried Twice is the first novel in The Anatomy of Secrets , an atmospheric Victorian historical mystery series combining fair-play detection, gothic Edinburgh, medical intrigue, morally complex crimes, and a sensual slow-burning romance between two women who read secrets in entirely different ways.
