WILL STARLING

A haunting literary thriller. Reminiscent of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, this gripping and haunting story will throw you into the streets of Regency London. Based on meticulous research steeped in scientific lore, THE DOOMSDAY MAN is a novel about love and redemption, death and resurrection.

London, 1816. The Napoleonic War is over, Romanticism is at its high tide, and the great city is charged with the thrill of scientific discovery and Regency abandon. Into this milieu, the nineteen-year-old foundling Will Starling returns from the Continent, having spent five years assisting military surgeon Alec Ullswater. Cocky, charming and damaged, Will is helping Ullswater build a civilian practice—and a life—in London's rough Cripplegate area. This means entering into an uneasy alliance with the Doomsday Men: grave robbers who supply London's surgeons and anatomists with cadavers for dissection. When a grave robbing goes terribly wrong, it sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to the murder of a moneylender and the arrest of a young woman, Meg Nancarrow. As Meg is sentenced to hang, Will grows convinced that she is the innocent victim of an unholy conspiracy, and that the conspiracy traces itself back to Dionysus Atherton, an old university friend of Ullswater's and the brightest of London's emerging surgical stars. There are wild rumours about Atherton: whispers of experiments on corpses not quite dead—indeed, on corpses wide-awake and wailing—in a bid to unlock the mystery of death itself. Will works obsessively to ferret out the truth, aided by an aspiring actress and occasional Cyprian named Annie Smollet, with whom he is headlong and hopelessly in love. As the mystery of The Doomsday Man deepens, lurid tales of Bug-Eye Bob, a ghoul that has returned from the grave to stalk the metropolis, grips London's gutter press. And there are darker tales, of a ragged band that is gathering in London's worst slum around a woman who was hanged, and then resurrected. Will's investigation twists and turns through brothels and charnel houses and the mansions of Mayfair, to a final confrontation and a shocking truth—about Dionysus Atherton, and about Will himself. North Carolina-born Ian Weir is an award winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist. His first historical fiction novel, Daniel O‘Thunder, was named one of the top historical novels of 2011 by Library Journal and was a finalist for four awards. Ian was writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed CBC miniseries Dragon Boys. He has also written more than 150 episodes for over twenty different series, stage plays, radio plays, and young adult novels. Ian lives near Vancouver, B.C., with his wife Jude and their daughter.