Friday Memes: The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn

Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

This week I am spotlighting a book a friend chose for me at ALA. The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn is a Southern Gothic mystery and thriller. Here is the description of this July 8 release:

A young doctor wrestles with the legacy of a slave “resurrectionist” owned by his South Carolina medical school.

"Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again." So begins the fall term at South Carolina Medical College, where Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career—working public relations for the dean—takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves, over a century old, are unearthed on campus. Out of the college’s dark past, these bones threaten to rise and condemn the present.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dr. Frederick Augustus Johnston, one of the school’s founders, had purchased a slave for his unusual knife skills. This slave, Nemo ("no man") would become an unacknowledged member of the surgical faculty by day—and by night, a "resurrectionist," responsible for procuring bodies for medical study. An unforgettable character, by turns apparently insouciant, tormented, and brilliant, and seen by some as almost supernatural, Nemo will seize his self-respect in ways no reader can anticipate.

With exceptional storytelling pacing and skill, Matthew Guinn weaves together past and present to relate a Southern Gothic tale of shocking crimes and exquisite revenge, a riveting and satisfying moral parable of the South.

Beginning:

Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again. Always, Jacob feels the old stir of anticipation when the baked stillness of August us broken by their return to campus, these young people crackling with energy in the last sullen days of summer.

Friday 56:

"It is. We named our man Henry. Not very imaginative, I know. I used to have dreams of old naked Henry climbing off the table and chasing me with a scalpel."