The Corpse Queen
$18.99
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| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
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Description
“Deliciously macabre and utterly decadent.” —Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper
In this dark and twisty feminist historical mystery, a teenage girl starts a new life as a grave robber but quickly becomes entangled in a murderer’s plans.
Soon after her best friend Kitty mysteriously dies, orphaned seventeen-year-old Molly Green is sent away to live with her “aunt.” With no relations that she knows of, Molly assumes she has been sold as a maid for the price of an extra donation in the church orphanage’s coffers. Such a thing is not unheard of. There are only so many options for an unmarried girl in 1850s Philadelphia. Only, when Molly arrives, she discovers her aunt is very much real, exceedingly wealthy, and with secrets of her own. Secrets and wealth she intends to share—for a price.
Molly’s estranged aunt Ava, has built her empire by robbing graves and selling the corpses to medical students who need bodies to practice surgical procedures. And she wants Molly to help her procure the corpses. As Molly learns her aunt’s trade in the dead of night and explores the mansion by day, she is both horrified and deeply intrigued by the anatomy lessons held at the old church on her aunt’s property. Enigmatic Doctor LaValle’s lessons are a heady mixture of knowledge and power and Molly has never wanted anything more than to join his male-only group of students. But the cost of inclusion is steep and with a murderer loose in the city, the pursuit of power and opportunity becomes a deadly dance.Praise for The Corpse Queen:
A 2023 Rhode Island Teen Book Award Nominee
A 2022 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
★ “Stylishly smart and macabre, the story . . . sparkle[s] with class-defying friendships and warmth. Part mystery, part thriller, and part family discovery, this is a delicious horror story from which the reader can’t look away.” —Booklist, starred review
“This historical thriller is dark, twisty, and perfect for a spooky fall read.” —Buzzfeed
“Dark. Glittering. Dangerous. The Corpse Queen is deliciously macabre and utterly decadent. Like a well-placed scalpel, Molly’s sharp mind and cool determination in a male-dominated world will slip under your skin and snip at your heartstrings. A cinematic story cleverly plotted and intoxicatingly addictive; I gulped it down in one sitting.” —Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper
“The plot rockets along, greased by the rot of the dead, to a satisfying, and somewhat surprising, conclusion. If Poe’s daughter told a story, this might be it.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Dripping with Gothic decadence and dark romantic allure, this novel hits all the right notes. . . It’s a must-read.” —Hypable
“A historical mystery that will give you goosebumps.” —Pop Sugar
“Smartly written with a decidedly dark demeanor . . . this immersive, Frankenstein-tinged novel considers misogyny, socioeconomic divides, and social norms at a specific moment in modern surgery’s beginnings.” —Publishers Weekly
“A wonderfully macabre thriller that mines considerable tension and chills from the grotesqueries and disturbing lack of ethics in nineteenth-century medical inquiry, leaning as much on various characters’ utter lack of compassion as on blood and guts for its horror. Molly is appealing in her complexity . . . [and] as taken by new science as any clever girl would be. . . A winner for fans of Bray’s Diviner series.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“Set in 1850s Philadelphia, this macabre novel is full of death, corpses, and anomalies. It highlights the dark practice of body snatching that was historically used to study anatomy. The writing is fast paced and highlights Molly and her aunt as independent feminists. The dark plot flows well with a surprise ending, keeping readers intrigued. . . A great YA addition to libraries serving high school students, this gothic fiction title will appeal to young adult fans of the horror genre.” —School Library Journal
“Full of scares and surprises.” —Girls’ Life
“[For] fan[s] of the dark and macabre. . . [and] stories that dig into the earthy underbelly of society.” —MuggleNetHeather Herrman’s fiction blends beauty and the macabre. Her obsession with horror began with a sixth-grade slumber party viewing of Night of the Demons. She loves prairie winds, tales of wicked women, and landscapes that look like they could eat you. Her debut horror novel, Consumption, is available through Random House/Hydra. She holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and is an active member of The Horror Writer’s Association. Her work has received support from The Prague Writer’s Program and The Nebraska Arts Council. Heather currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The dead do not always keep their secrets.
Sometimes the living must do it for them.
Tucking the knife into her pocket, Molly Green climbed down into the grave.
The river had slipped inside the dead girl like a rotten kiss, swelling her skin until it split. Her once-beautiful raven hair was tangled and clotted with mud, and a rancid smell rose from the body like potted meat left in the sun.
What she was about to do made her think of the horrible stories the nuns told. About a queen of corpses in Philadelphia.
“Oh, Kitty,” she whispered.
Struggling to stay calm, she wrapped her arms around her friend and lifted.
From above, the moon’s fading glow turned Molly’s red hair to flames.
Kitty’s corpse peeled up reluctantly from the ground, like dough scraped too soon from a pan. Parts of her seemed to want to stay stuck forever in the frozen February earth, and the harder Molly wrenched, the more she felt she would break her.
“Damn it,” Molly whispered. “Let me help you!”
There was a terrible second when she was sure Kitty’s limbs would simply pull apart like a bug’s legs caught in flypaper, but then she yanked harder and the body tumbled free.
Molly lay there, gasping, Kitty’s dead body on top of her, the weight unbearably heavy on her heart.
Overhead, a grease moth circled lazily, then landed, seeking to feed. Molly felt its tiny, delicate feet skitter across her skin.
In that instant, she wanted nothing more than to give up. To scream until the nuns found her, and then maybe she could die too. They’d put her in an asylum, and she could stay there for the rest of her days, screaming with the other madwomen, pulling out her hair and banging her head on stone walls, where at least then she could be free from the constant disappointment of others.
No.
It’s Kitty, she reminded herself. Kitty, whom you love. Kitty, who could not make a corner on a bed, who laughed like a bird and sang like a tiger. Kitty. Your Kitty.
The stink was nearly unbearable now, but there was something sweetly familiar in the rot, a scent that made her think of Christmas.
She and Kitty had stolen an entire ham from the nuns’ last feast day, and no one had ever been the wiser.
“The trick,” said Kitty, “is to commit your sins in plain sight.”
And that was what they’d done, carrying the tray between them out the side door of the orphanage, as brave as you please. A passing priest had even offered them the sign of the cross.
They had not been able to stop laughing, the two of them triumphantly devouring their spoils, hidden high up in an old oak tree like giddy crows. Licking the slick of peppermint-and-clove glaze from their frozen fingers.
Now, using her knife, she reached around Kitty and began to cut away what was left of the ruined dress. The blade slipped, its rusty metal dull from too many kitchen washings, slicing jaggedly into her palm. She felt blood welling to the surface but did not stop.
The dress fell away. Molly ran her fingers up the icy skin, searching.
She had seen it only once—a small pink piece of flesh, no bigger than a finger.
She and Kitty had been swimming in the river, the sunlight dancing between them. Its rays caught a jeweled drop of water on the wiggling nub just below the small of Kitty’s back.
But as quickly as the strange limb had appeared, Kitty had submerged it. “The priest says anomalies of the flesh are a punishment,” she whispered.
Molly should have turned away. Refused to involve herself in the lives of another orphan, as she always had before she met Kitty. Instead, she said, “The priest is a great fat fucking liar.”
The words hung between them like a dare.
Then Kitty laughed, and everything changed.
In that moment, they became more than just two orphans—they became bound. Sisters.
“No one else can ever know.” Kitty’s face grew serious. “Please, Molly. They’ll never let me be just a girl again. I’ll be a sermon or . . . or . . . a freak.”
“I swear it,” Molly had promised.
From afar came the sound of approaching voices. The nuns, finally come to clean the body.
They should have done it back at the church, as they did for all the other dead. Molly had waited all night, hiding herself in the priest’s confession closet after she’d heard they’d dragged her missing friend’s body from the river.
But the body had never arrived, and in the last hours before daybreak, not knowing what else to do, she had come here, had watched as the new gardener pulled Kitty’s body from his shed and tossed it like trash into the hole. The man was a Swedish Protestant and had either not been told to leave the body in the church or, with his limited English, had simply misunderstood.
The nuns’ voices drew closer.
“Hurry up, Mary Margaret. That fool gardener’s already put her in the ground. Someone find him and have him dig her out.”
When they cleaned Kitty, they’d see the tail, and then Molly knew what would happen—like a brood of clucking hens, they’d bring the juicy worm of a story to Mother Superior.
Kitty would no longer just be a girl; she’d be a girl who had sinned.
A girl who had done something so terrible that God had punished her with a disfigurement before she was even born. They’d say she’d deserved it. They’d say, probably, that she deserved to be dead too. And they wouldn’t say it silently. They’d let the priest preach it from his pulpit, spread Kitty’s name like an infection to the other orphan girls, along with all the other doomed women he railed against each Sunday.
The moon’s cool glow grew pink, eclipsed by the rising sun. Molly lifted her face to its bloody light.
Grabbing Kitty’s lifeless hand, she held it a final time. Mother Superior was wrong. Kitty would never have left her willingly.
I’ll find who did this to you, Kitty, I swear it. And when I do . . .
She felt the rage rise like a wave in her breast but quickly tamped it down.
She had but minutes. Seconds, maybe. The nuns might not give Kitty’s stained soul the burial it deserved, but they would not besmirch God by sending filthy flesh to his judgment table.
With all her strength, Molly crawled from beneath the waterlogged body.
She had failed Kitty once. She would not fail her again.
Standing above the corpse, she raised the knife . . .
But the tail was already gone.
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| Dimensions | 1.3100 × 5.8800 × 8.6300 in |
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| Subjects | books for 12 year old girls, YAF024150, award winning books for teens, spooky season, teen suspense books, tween books for girls ages 11-14, books for 12 year old boys, psychological thrillers, historical fiction books, books for 13 year old boys, books for 14 year old girls, teen fiction books, books for 13 year old girls, thriller, good books for teens, young adult novels, fiction books, mystery thriller suspense, young adult fiction, suspense books, thriller books, historical fiction, thrillers, YAF058050, death, suspense |
