A Feast of Carrion [Paperback]

" 'Readers who don't get enough strong forensic medicine from the likes of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs... will welcome this first book... McCarthy lays on the grisly detail with a practising doctor's detached eye.' Publishers Weekly 'This richly gothic novel... uses the classic whodunit format of a closed circle of suspects to good effect...a potent mix.' Tangled Web 'Pathologist McCarthy creates a dark, densely imagined world in the demanding tradition of P D James... he peoples it with characters who truly inspire pity and terror, and provides the most unsparing postmortem ever.' Kirkus Reviews"

St Benjamin's Museum of Pathology is the greatest of its kind. Any death occurring within its walls would have created ripples within the academic world, but the death of Nikki Exner is far from being ordinary. Raped, and then grotesquely executed, her theatrical murder horrifies everyone. John Eisenmenger, a former forensic pathologist, finds himself dragged unwillingly into the Exner case, despite his desire to forget the awfulness he has had to endure in his past professional life. The police have fingered a suspect for the murder but Eisenmenger thinks they are wrong. The results of his second autopsy just don't add up to the findings of the first. Teaming up with solicitor Helena Flemming - who has her own personal reasons for wanting to prove the police wrong - Eisenmenger sets out to discover what really did happen to Nikki Exner. And during the course of this pursuit of the truth both Eisenmenger and Flemming find there is much more at stake than uncovering the identity of a murderer: there are scores to be settled, demons to be exorcised, and, not least, vengeance to be had.

Although this is a work of pure fiction, the anatomical and pathological detail is completely authentic and the motives and attitudes of some of the characters are merely an exaggeration of normality.
There is no such Medical School as the one described, but the Pathology Museum in which the murder occurs is based on reality and the intention has been to bring to the reader a taste of what strange and wonderful places museums of pathology can be.
Pathology is the study of disease and, although it has a reputation for being a profession irrevocably linked with the less savoury aspects of human life, it is at heart a problem-solving process and as such is closely akin to the wider world of crime detection. Pathologists do what they do because they gain satisfaction from resolving a puzzle and explaining a mystery.
And, after all, there is no greater mystery than death. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Keith McCarthy was born in Croydon, Surrey. Educated at Dulwich College and then at St George's Hospital Medical School, he began practising pathology in 1985. At present Keith is a Consultant Histopathologist in Gloucestershire where he lives with his wife and three daughters. He is currently working on his third novel featuring ex-pathologist Dr John Eisenmenger and his partner Helena Flemming.