Death Meridian

A killer makes his way across Victorian-era Eastern Europe, leaving a trail of bodies sapped of life force in his wake. His destination is the port city of Bethezna, host of the first global scientific symposium.

As the last surviving priestess of a goddess-worshiping sect that communed with spirits and raised the dead in sacred ceremonies, Kendre recognizes the purpose of the killings, and it chills her to the bone.

The Governor himself charges her with stopping the killer before he embarrasses the city on the world's stage, with the reward of sanctuary for Kendre's religion hanging in the balance. She's the last of her kind, but with political change she wouldn't have to be, and the possibility dazzles and terrifies.

Kendre navigates an underground economy of grave robbers and anatomists to find the killer, but there are plenty of distractions to slow her: She's dared to take an apprentice, the teenage daughter of one of the killer's victims with a scandalous connection to high society and a precocious thirst for knowledge that brings social and political disaster.

The symposium reunites Kendre with River, an old flame now obsessed with scientific advancement, whose ambitious electrical experiments threaten the city's safety and hold dark secrets in the bowels of the university.

Through a whirl of high society balls, resurrectionist stake-outs, costumed autopsy demonstrations, necromancy that goes right-and some that goes terribly wrong-Kendre struggles to find the killer as well as her place in a life she thought razed and salted, but now showing signs of life and hope.

It all ends on the roof of the university in a lightning storm, when gutting revelations Kendre couldn't have seen coming threaten to destroy everything she now holds dear.