The Dead Will Rise

By Chris Nickson https://chrisnickson.co.uk/ @ChrisNickson2

Published by Severn House https://severnhouse.com/ @severnhouse

291 pages ISBN 9781448310197

Publication date 7 March 2023

The Dead Will Rise is the fifth novel in the Simon Westow mysteries series. I was sent a NetGalley @NetGalley copy to enable me to take part in this Blog Tour. I would like to thank Anne at Random Things Tours @RandomTTours for the invitation to participate and of course the Author, Publisher and NetGalley.

The cover

Bold and on point with the story. I like the faint skull almost like a water mark.

From the blurb

Thief-taker Simon Westow is used to finding stolen goods, not stolen bodies . . . Can he hunt down those committing crimes against the dead in Leeds?

Leeds. April, 1824. Wealthy engineer Joseph Clark employs thief-taker Simon Westow to find the men who stole the buried corpse of Catherine Jordan, his employee’s daughter.

Simon is stunned and horrified to realize there’s a gang of body snatchers in Leeds. He needs to discover who bought Catherine’s body and where it is now. As he hunts for answers, he learns that a number of corpses have vanished from graveyards in the town. Can Simon and his assistant Jane bring the brutal, violent Resurrection men who are selling the dead to medical schools to justice and give some peace to the bereft families?

My thoughts

The North of England 1824, a time of great change. The Industrial Revolution is ramping up to meet the demands of an expanding British Empire and to exploit its raw materials. People had moved from a countryside existence to urban slums to provide the labour the industrial machine needed. Living in cramped insanitary conditions life for inhabitants was short and brutal. There was no recognisable police force, law and order was maintained by the local city watch and justice was often vicious. Minor crime could see you sentenced to an appointment with the hangman, if not and you were lucky, then you might to be transported to the other side of the world and let to your own devices. This background is exploited to the full and drawn out in shades of light and dark in this historical crime novel. The poverty, the downtrodden people but also those with some wealth and power.

Simon Westow is a ‘thief taker’ a strange amalgam of bounty hunter and debt collector. If you were robbed of something of value then the best chance of recovering the goods would be to engage a man like Simon and that would be his principal concern. If he is successful then he may also manage to apprehend the thief and bring them before the magistrate for a form of summary justice.

The plot centres on the heinous crime of grave robbing. Science like industry is increasing rapidly and medicine is at the forefront, but there is a serious shortage of cadavers for dissection which is vital for students to learn. This brings work for the Resurrection Men, grave robbers after fresh corpses rather than any jewellery or valuables. Foul and backbreaking ‘work’, a crime against society but not one that would result in the noose, for it was only a misdemeanour not a felony. To be a felony they would need to sell valuable possessions of the corpse. So, a disgusting crime but a low risk one unless they follow Burke and Hare and murder to provide corpses. When the body of a ten-year-old girl is stolen from a Leeds graveyard Simon is approached to locate those responsible, not his usual target but the disgust of his wife persuades him to get involved.

Whilst this is a Simon Westow novel it is not all about him the hero, as strong, at times deadly women are there front a centre. There is Jane the victim of appalling abuse in her childhood, destroyed as a girl who is being rebuilt as a young woman with the affection and counsel of Mrs Shields. Mrs Shields is the wise and cautious mentor she needs, as Jane is now able to handle herself in dangerous situations and is skilled with a knife to deadly effect. Able to be an everybody or a nobody she manages to blend into the background when working, her empathy with and generosity to the downtrodden, of whom she considers herself one, is a valuable source of information from the street. We also see her developing as a person too as she is learning to read with the guidance of Mrs Shields and with Rosie’s help basic mathematics.

Rosie is also keen to resume work with Simon and be in the thick of the action. Their twin boys are eight and Simon acknowledges that another pair of hands would mean they could take on more work. Desperate to be useful on the case, Rosie works on the fringes and proves her worth. Like Jane a woman to be trifled with at your peril.

The chase is across Leeds, not the city we know today, but one where villages and suburbs like Sheepscar and Headingley are distinct from the city itself. It’s clear the author has great affection for his home city as the action criss-crosses back and forth across this canvas. An excellent imagining of what a developing city might have been like 200 years ago.

The storyline ebbs and flows as Simon and assistant Jane become the hunters and the three men eventually identified as the resurrectionists are the hunted.  Paths intersect more than once as authorities fail in their duties and jeopardy is faced. Jane suffers great pain and indignity that fuels a desire for revenge, one that threatens to overwhelm her judgement. Knives are sharpened and violence meted out regularly but not graphically portrayed. More a case of if you draw your knife, you must be prepared to use it and the reader discovers that Jane is only too willing to do so, as is Simon’s wife. Sometimes you need to strike first and ask questions later.

The stop-start progression builds to a dramatic finale, one where answers are found, and justice is served but of a hollow kind as wrongs cannot be put right.

The Dead Will Rise is an excellent historical novel with a crime that can shock even the most brutal and downtrodden of society.

The Dead Will Rise can be purchased from Amazon here

The author

I’m a novelist and music journalist, the author of many books set between the 1730s and 1950s in Leeds, as well as others in medieval Chesterfield and 1980s Seattle.

Above all, though, its Leeds I love, the people, the sense of the place changing with time. Yes, I write mysteries, but ultmiateoly they’re books about people and their relationships, and the crime becomes a moral framework for the story.

Source: Goodreads profile

Don’t forget to check out the other reviews in this Blog Tour: