Death in Parts

Philadelphia, 1875. Dr. Lydia Weston is one of the first women doctors, she teaches at a medical school for women, and every day she fights for medicine to stop being an exclusively male profession. One day, an old patient of hers, Anna, a young maid, comes to see her. She is frightened and clearly hiding something. Soon after, Anna's body will be pulled from the river, her clothes found neatly folded on the shore. The death appears to be a suicide, but Dr. Lydia and her new acquaintances, Inspector Folker and Sergeant Davis, doubt that this is the case. With her knowledge of medicine and diagnostic insight, Lydia will steer the investigation in the right direction. "Death in Parts" is equally a Victorian detective story, an immersion into the era of medicine's emergence as a science, and a vivid portrait of a woman doctor ahead of her time. The book became a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the "debut detective" category. Ritu Mukerji is a practicing physician, and her medical descriptions are so vivid and detailed that one can see the reflection of the lamp in the scalpel of her heroine Lydia Weston.