The Case of Lady Sannox

Douglas Stone, London's most daring surgeon, is a man of steel nerve and expensive tastes; his affair with a peer's wife is the scandal the clubs chew over nightly. On a wet winter evening, his carriage already ordered for her door, a stooped Turkish curio dealer is shown in and empties a hundred pounds in gold onto the table. His wife has cut her lip on a poisoned dagger; only the knife can save her, and the work will take an hour. Stone counts the minutes he can spare, and goes.

Late-Victorian medical horror at its coldest: a veiled patient in a dust-choked house off the Euston Road, and a surgeon trained to see a case, not a person.