Will Starling

London, 1816. Will Starling is helping former military surgeon Alec Comrie set up a medical practice in a rundown area of the city. To survive they must look the other way when the Doomsday Men come to call. These are men who rob graves for corpses they then sell to surgeons and medical schools. When one grave robbery goes awry and a man is murdered, young Megan Nancarrow is arrested. Not only does Will believe her to be innocent, he thinks she is at the center of a huge conspiracy perpetrated by a man called Atherton, a former classmate of Comrie and also a fellow surgeon. There are terrible rumors about the bodies that end up in Atherton’s lab, bodies that do not appear to be dead, that scream and try to escape. Will is bound and determined to exonerate Meg and discover once and for all what atrocities are occurring in Atherton’s lab.

An incredible tale, rich in historical detail and in the bloody horrors of the time. Highly recommended

Thank you to Steerforth Press and netgalley for this arc.

I did not want this book to end. It was that good. I liked everything about it, cuz you can't go wrong with a great historical fiction book with awesome characters and storytelling. you will laugh, cry, yell, and enjoy yourself immensely.

Perhaps Will Starling was born to hang. He was left at a foundling hospital as an infant. Once he was old enough to strike out on his own, Will press-gangs himself into the British Army to fight Napoleon. (There was some question about whether or not the infantryman was joking or not.) Just when you think Will has landed on his feet as a surgeon's assistant in London, love and hatred pull him into a dark mystery in Ian Weir's Will Starling.

Our first clue that things are not going well for Will is his admission that he's writing from a condemned cell in Newgate Prison. He's writing, as the broadsheets would have it, his "Last Dying Confession." In this confession, Will pieces together the events of the previous March of 1816, when a rogue surgeon tried to cure death and ruined the lives of nearly everyone who knew him.

Will get involved when a man choked to death on a candied plum while trying to assault Will's sweetheart. Later, the sweetheart comes to tell Will that she saw the man and was afraid for her life. Will's questions lead him to Dionysius Atherton. Atherton is rich and connected and untouchable when it comes to the law.

As Will pieces together what happened to Atherton's victims, Weir paints a highly detailed portrait of London for his readers. London, in Will Starling, is peopled by Resurrection Men, rakes and Cyprians, actors willing to fake testimony in court, unethical scientists, bruisers and ex-soldiers. I adored the language Weir used. His vocabulary is refreshingly gargantuan (a good eighteenth century word), peppered with classical allusions and Latin malapropisms. I had a great time reading this book.

I received a free copy of this ebook from NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. It will be released 3 February 2015.

Let me bite the bullet and say it; I don’t think that Frankenstein is a great book. However there is no doubting its importance or its cultural relevance. At the heart of the book lies an endlessly fascinating question; was Frankenstein’s error in creating life, or in failing to take responsibility for the life he created? A similar dilemma can be found in Will Starling, a terrific new novel by Ian Weir.

Some novels take some time to find their rhythm, but I knew that this book was good from the first page. Mr. Wier grabs you by the lapels, with great style and a distinct and original prose. The first-person narration, by one Will Starling, is full of charm and unflagging energy, and I could have read this novel for that alone and been satisfied. There is however, a whole lot more to this novel than that.

WIll has just come back from the Napoleonic wars to England, having become an assistant to the brilliant but poor Surgeon Alec Comrie. They are starting a practice in the slums of Cripplegate, and have some familiarity with the Doomsday Men; the body-snatchers who provide corpses for surgeons. They are also known the rich and equally brilliant Surgeon Dionysus Atherton.

The plot of this tale is rollicking yet layered, so I am loathe to tell you much more, but after a botched grave-robbery, and some mob justice, a grieving prostitute is accused of murder, and Will Starling, with one foot in the street and one foot in the world of science and medicine, begins to see a conspiracy of diabolical cleverness that may involve Atherton, and may also just ensnare anyone who gets caught up in it.

Like the medical science of the time, the world portrayed by Mr. Weir is bloody and short. This is an historical novel that is full of sharp detail, but it’s not about hoop skirts and fox hunts. There is a loaf of anger in this story and most of it is righteous and well-deserved. Most of the characters in Will Starling have the deck stacked against them, but they push on, with a perseverance and an elan that makes a grim book a pleasure to read. Not to say that things are all sunshine and roses; there is plenty of misery to go around. Unrequited love, injustice, poverty, betrayal, arrogance, hubris, it’s all here in spades.

The bravery of common people, and the dignity of the downtrodden, and Mr. Weir’s care for these characters makes it all work. Will, the narrator is the star, but all of the rest of the characters, not matter how small, are brought to life. Meg Nancarrow will haunt me for years. She’s the kind of character that could carry her own book with ease.

When the story starts to race towards the end I got the feeling that I often get with the best of books; that the outcome is both surprising and inevitable, and that as much as I wanted to find out what happened, I dreaded the book coming to end. The question Ms. Shelley asked so many years ago is still relevant, and in Will Starling Mr. Weir shows that the answer may never be known; but posing that question, and doing it with daring and originality, is important enough.

Review by: Mark Palm Full Reviews Available at: http://www.thebookendfamily.weebly.com