AS AN INTELLIGENT young woman living in provincial France in 1894, Madeleine Karno has two clear career paths: She can find a husband or become a pathologist. The strong-minded heroine of Lene Kaaberbol's DOCTOR DEATH (Atria, $25) comes by her passion for the forensic sciences naturally since she serves as assistant to her widowed father, Dr. Albert Karno, coroner for the town of Varbourg. But Madeleine's ambitions would scandalize the neighbors, so it's kept very hush-hush when she visits the local hospital to help him examine the abused body of 17-year-old Cecile Montaine, who went missing after leaving her convent school. The extraordinary discovery of living mites in Cecile's dead body initiates an absorbing scientific investigation into the different kinds of parasites and how they affect their human and animal hosts. That line of inquiry may sound dry, but it leads to some exciting adventures for the intellectually curious Madeleine, including a trip to the Forch-hammer Institute in Heidelberg, where she meets August Dreyfuss, a dashing young professor of parasitology. Back home, she slips into the hospital's operating theater to witness the latest surgical techniques. Madeleine is elated to hear the enlightened surgeon who pioneered these procedures declare that "this is a bright new era," if not quite bright enough to admit a female medical student. More progressive views are held by Mother Filippa, abbess of the St. Bernardine convent and guardian of the gray wolves that for centuries have been kept on its grounds, making this ancient sanctuary a crossroads of science and superstition. Learning that the nuns teach physics, biology and chemistry, Madeleine sighs for the years she wasted at Madame Aubrey's Academy for Young Ladies. Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who translated Kaaberbol's novel from the Danish, occasionally lets her down ("I know this is a tough time for you"), but Madeleine's inquisitive mind and candid voice are enough to keep us reading when the parasites turn up in more murdered bodies and the science gets downright weird. "EVERY MOTHER'S NIGHTMARE" is a phrase that comes up a lot in domestic suspense stories, but nightmares are hardly restricted to mothers. Bryan Reardon's first novel, FINDING JAKE (Morrow/Harper-Collins, $26.99), tells the harrowing tale of a deadly school shooting from a father's perspective, a twist that makes the story sadder and lonelier because, unlike mothers, fathers don't often have access to quality support systems. Simon Connolly, who narrates this account of his ordeal in the quiet, controlled voice of someone still in shock, is a stay-at-home dad with mixed feelings about that role. "I had missed nothing of my son's life," he reminds himself, thinking of all the time he's spent with Jake. But he also grieves for the job he gave up so his wife could forge ahead in her career at a fancy law firm. "Shuffling paper had been so great," he confesses, "I missed it horribly." Flashback chapters record the various stages of Simon's hard-won acquisition of parenting skills as he raises both Jake and his little sister, Laney. And yet, despite the bouts of self-doubt ("Real men don't playdate"), Simon doesn't actually question the way he's brought up his children - until he faces the horror of the school shooting and the distress of discovering that Jake, who has gone missing, is suspected of being involved. The suspense is killing, but it's nothing compared with this father's anguish as he tries to find his son - the real boy, not the one he thought he knew. LONDON MAY HAVE BEEN the swinging center of the universe back in 1968, but not for cops like Detective Sgt. Cathal Breen, who has to clean up after the beautiful people when they overdose on drugs, have illegal abortions or get themselves murdered. In William Shaw's insightful novel the KINGS OF LONDON (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) the stern and stolid Sergeant Breen feels out of his depth when a criminal investigation takes him into the bohemian world where "groovy people" buy and sell "cool art." But having recently lost his father, an uneasy transplant from Ireland, he can relate to someone like the Welsh Labour Party politician mourning the death of the son who had become a stranger to him. A melancholy tone is only to be expected in a novel about the estrangement of fathers and sons, but Shaw has gone beyond that, creating an elegy for an entire alienated generation. IT'S NO FUN reading a medieval mystery if it isn't steeped in filth, squalor and pestilence. S.D. Sykes gets right to the point in PLAGUE LAND (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), which serves it all up in vivid detail, from the noxious smells to an actual burial pit, heaped with the putrefying bodies of plague victims. Half the population of Somershill, including the lord of the manor and his two older sons, perished when the pestilence swept through the countryside, which is how a callow youth like Oswald de Lacy comes to be in charge when the story opens in 1350. It's hard enough for him to save the estate from ruin when his serfs won't work the fields because a priest has convinced them that dog-headed beasts are to blame for the death of a farmer's daughter. Sykes does like to play in the mud, but she also devises a clever plot to test Oswald's mettle, pitting the rational thinking he learned at a monastery against the superstitions of his age.

Set mainly in 1894 in provincial Varbourg, France, Kaaberbol's excellent first in a new historical series introduces Dr. Albert Karno and his scalpel-sharp 20-year-old daughter, Madeleine, who must figure out who murdered lovely 17-year-old Cecile Montaine. Days later, Father Abigore, the Montaine family priest, is murdered as well, and his body is stolen during a violent attack on the hearse transporting it. The investigation pushes passionate aspiring physician Madeleine well beyond conventional expectations for a proper young woman. She goes to Heidelberg to seek the aid of a dashing academic, and later to the forest-ringed Bernardine convent where Cecile was attending school until her disappearance. Deftly exploring such themes as the struggles between mind and body, science and spirit-without detracting from a gripping plot-the novel transcends its period to contemplate the eternal. Kaaberbol is the coauthor with Agnete Friis of the Nina Borg series (Death of a Nightingale, etc.). Agent: Lars Ringhof, Lars Ringhof Agency (Denmark). (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

It is 1894, and in the French provincial town of Varbourg, Madeleine and her father, Dr. Karno, use forensic science to help the city commissioner solve a particularly troubling murder, the death of 17-year-old Cecile Montaine. As the mystery unwinds, it becomes clear there are several other players involved in this crime, and that perhaps other deaths around the city can be tied to the same killer. Madeleine is an absorbing protagonist, as she deals with the challenge of trying to work as a female amateur investigator in the male-dominated medical profession. Focusing on the miracles of science that allow her to learn about the victims, Madeleine's point of view adds a softer lens on the deaths and violence depicted. VERDICT The coauthor of the "Nina Borg" series (The Boy in the Suitcase) goes solo with this engrossing mystery that deals with the darker side of life in 19th-century Europe. With its complex characters, this is sure to please fans of historical mysteries. [See Prepub Alert, 9/1/14.]-Elizabeth Nelson, McHenry Cty. Coll. Lib., Crystal Lake, IL (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Varbourg, France, 1894. A girl is found dead, apparently from natural causes. Her family adamantly refuses permission for an autopsy, but when Dr. Albert Karno is examining the body, he discovers something very odd: tiny mites inside the girl's nasal cavity, still alive. Soon there's another body, that of a priest who'd been in attendance during the examination of the girl's body; shockingly, the priest's body is stolen, for what ghoulish purposes no one can imagine. But Karno and his 20-year-old daughter, Madeleine (who narrates the book and is its principle character), suspect a scientific explanation for the bizarre body theft, and, as more deaths occur, they use the new, mostly unknown science of forensics to solve the mystery. Combining good historical atmosphere with realistic characters and (for its time) cutting-edge science, the novel will draw historical-mystery fans and those fascinated by the antecedents of the modern CSI era. If subsequent installments are as satisfying as this first in a series, bring them on.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist