The novels of Ambrose Parry are steeped in Victorian Edinburgh

(Canongate, £16.99)

Like Kaite Welsh’s Sarah Gilchrist series, albeit set 40 years earlier, the novels of Ambrose Parry are steeped in the atmosphere of Victorian Edinburgh, with Surgeon’s Hall at its very centre. And just as the New Town, that genteel symbol of the Enlightenment, can never escape the murky shadow of its medieval predecessor, the city’s prestigious medical school is still sensitive, even in the 1850s, about its scandalous historical connection with grave-robbers. It’s in the place where these two Edinburghs meet that husband-and-wife team Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman locate their occasionally macabre medical mysteries.

The first in the series, The Way of All Flesh, introduced Sarah Fisher, who dearly wants to become a doctor but is held back by a medical profession that will not countenance women studying Medicine. Taken under the wing of James Young Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform, she works at a practice alongside Simpson’s other protégé, Will Raven, a doctor with a tougher and more chequered past than most. Sexual tension has simmered between them throughout the series, but now, in the fourth instalment, Sarah has been married and widowed and Will has a wife and a child, with another on the way.

Sarah’s frustrated ambition is one of the forces that drives the story along. These are good times for Simpson, with Queen Victoria having announced that she used chloroform for the birth of her most recent baby. Sarah, though, can see only unfulfilment ahead of her. As a woman, she’ll never be able to call herself a doctor.

Fatefully, the American mesmerist Dr Malham arrives in the city with aim of making mesmerism respectable and seeing it incorporated into orthodox medicine. Sarah is intrigued. With the conventional medical route closed off to her, she can see the benefits of getting involved in a promising field where she might be able to make her mark. Coincidentally, a bogus medium is in town too, and is humiliated in public by Simpson (based on a real incident, when the doctor rumbled a medium’s methods). Sarah starts to feel uncomfortable with the American’s flamboyance and showmanship, fearing that mesmerism will be damned by association as cheap parlour tricks.

Meanwhile, of course, there is a murder to solve, with dismembered body parts being found in Surgeon’s Hall and elsewhere. Will Raven finds himself under pressure from several directions: from the fearsome detective James McLevy to use his medical knowledge to find the culprit; from the head of Surgeon’s Hall to direct his investigation away from the college, or else; and from notorious moneylender Callum Flint to find the murderer so he can recover a debt from him.

As befits an atmospheric mystery, the realm where showbiz, science and spiritualism meet and merge into one another is explored to great effect. Scientific demonstrations become indistinguishable from theatre, the suspected murderer’s actorly background and skill for disguise become a major feature of the investigation, while one of the major characters transforms from one person to another in plain sight (though not in everyone’s plain sight) and our humiliated medium still has more tricks up his sleeve. There is misdirection everywhere.

It’s all very deftly constructed, and comes with a distinctive and memorable supporting cast – including the colourful, charismatic Malham and the pitiable giant Gregor, who is desperate to avoid falling into the clutches of the anatomists after his imminent and inevitable death – while both Sarah’s and Will’s characters are tested in a series of challenges, temptations and hard choices, any one of which could have an irreversible effect on their lives.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT