SLEUTH-HOUND BY LINDSAY FITZHARRIS
£25
From the bestselling author of The Butchering Art and The Facemaker comes the astonishing true story of Joseph Bell, the Scottish surgeon whose extraordinary talent for detection inspired Sherlock Holmes. Criminally Good Books will have signed editions for pre-order plus a gift with purchase! A shop indie pin badge.
With its revelations about Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and even Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sleuth-hound (RRP £25, publication 20/10/25) touches on some of literature's most iconic subjects and should appeal to readers of bestsellers like The Five, The Suspicions of Mr Wicher and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.
About the Book
Edinburgh, 1878. A medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle squeezes into the Royal Infirmary’s packed operating theatre, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrated professor whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work.
That professor was Joseph Bell, who became one of the most celebrated surgeons and medical reformers of his age. With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details, he astonished his students with lightning-fast deductions about his patients’ backgrounds and ailments. Together with Edinburgh’s chief police surgeon, Henry Duncan Littlejohn, Bell also investigated some of the highest-profile murders of the century, including those of Jack the Ripper, and collaborated with forensic specialists such as a ballistics expert named Dr. Watson. And as Conan Doyle’s mentor, Bell inspired the creation of literature’s most iconic sleuth: Sherlock Holmes.
International bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the smog-choked alleys and crowded slums of Victorian Edinburgh to tell the compelling, untold story of the birth of modern forensic science through the life of its most charismatic figure.
About the Author
Lindsey Fitzharris is a New York Times bestselling author of The Butchering Art, which won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. She received her doctorate in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Wellcome Institute. Lindsey's previous books, The Facemaker and the Butchering Art, have won prizes and been highly praised in the Telegraph, Economist, Guardian, TLS and New York Times for her meticulous research and gripping prose.
Format: Hardback exclusive signed editions