Description

The poor are selling their years. The rich are buying back their dead.

London, November 1893. A shirt-sewer from Southwark sells fifteen years of her life for a handful of sovereigns and dies that same night an old woman, with the teeth of a girl and a violet stain behind each ear.

She is not the first. Across London and Paris the desperate are queuing at the clinics of the Bethany Benevolent Fund, and in the quiet houses of Kensington the dead are coming home.

Abraham Van Helsing, barely returned from Transylvania, is drawn into the mystery by a Norwegian chemist named Sigerson, who happens to be Sherlock Holmes, dead these two and a half years. With Henry Jekyll and Dorian Gray beside them, neither of whom should still be living, they follow the trail from the Paris Morgue to the glaciers above Chamonix, and to a society that has taken its name from the fourth day of Lazarus.

Walking through doors left open by Shelley, Le Fanu, Stevenson, Wilde, Stoker and Conan Doyle, The Lazarus Conspiracy is a gothic mystery about the price of eternity, and about who is made to pay it.