The Willed Body

About this book

Hester Quaile was once the most celebrated dean in the history of Kessock University's medical school. Now, disgraced and sixty-three, she cuts demonstration specimens in the basement of the Pennsylvania anatomy building where her career began. In October 2019 a first-year student, a former paramedic named Nell Varga, brings her a puzzle from the dissection floor: a donor's throat bone, broken the way a strangler's hands break it. The course director says it's nothing. Then Hester looks at the woman on Table Eleven and knows her. She is a woman a jury decided was murdered twenty-five years ago, a woman whose body was never found, and whose supposed killer went to prison partly on Hester's word. Somebody knew she had been alive all this time. To find out who silenced her, Hester will have to reopen the night the anatomy lab burned, and the lie she has told about it ever since.