The Nature of Monsters.

Clark, Clare (author).

Clark’s sophomore novel, after the well-received The Great Stink (2005),is another authentically detailed and atmospheric historical. Set in the aftermath of the Great Fire in the fetid streets of eighteenth-century London, the complex plot involves a pregnant unmarried teen shunted off into domestic service as an apothecary’s maid. As it becomes increasingly clear to Eliza Tally that her shrouded employer has sinister motives, she must uncover the nature of his dubious experimentations and his unhealthy obsessions with the monstrous and the malformed before it is too late to save both herself and her half-witted fellow maid. Readers who are not put off by the graphically documented grotesqueries and perversions will be drawn into the spellbinding gothic netherworld Clark spins.