A love captured. A woman unbound. A gentleman dead.... The year is 1865. Gwen Carrick is on trial at the Old Bailey for murder. The victim is Edward Scales, a businessman, a butterfly collector, a respectable man. He is the man she fell in love with 10 years before. Be not deceived by the prisoner's apparent stature, by her - notable - command of language; and nor yet by her insistence of guiltlessness. This, gentlemen, is a wily female cornered, who would stop at nothing to get what she wants.
From Cornish country houses to the rainforests of Brazil, The Specimen asks whether Gwen could really murder the man she loved, and discovers the cost one woman could pay for wanting an unorthodox life. Set in a Victorian world battling between the forces of spiritualism and Darwinism, polite society and the urge to clandestine love, this magnetic novel is a gripping melodrama, a doomed love story and a murder mystery.
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"I really enjoyed this. It had a frank determination. I found the characters interesting and felt I could smell and taste the atmosphere it created." — Nicky (4 out of 5 stars)
"I really enjoyed this. It had a frank determination. I found the characters interesting and felt I could smell and taste the atmosphere it created."
" It's difficult to know how to react to this book. It's imaginative and well written, but the characters are all very unpleasant (with the possible exception of Gwen) and there is no real sense of resolution at the end. "
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