Book One – The Cinnabar Mark

Book Two – The Seven Gates

Series Overview

Across two novels, Dr. Marsh — military surgeon, London physician, reluctant soldier in a secret war — and the relentless intelligence operative Vane are drawn again and again into the orbit of Dr. Mann: scientific genius, criminal sovereign, and something stranger than either.

In The Cinnabar Mark, Mann’s death-marked campaign against London opens onto a deeper architecture of villainy — a sister, a teacher, a network that grows a new head each time one is cut away — and ends with Mann himself turned uneasy ally, trying to trade mastery for atonement. In The Seven Gates, his return reveals the true scale of the thing behind him: a lineage of “doctors” who have spent more than a century treating death as a problem to be solved, and a final campaign aimed not at the city’s body but at its institutions and its faith in itself.

Binding the two is a single question Mann poses and Marsh inherits: in an age when medicine can extend, enhance, and control human life, who decides what may be done with what has been discovered? Each book pairs Marsh with someone Mann has tried to make into an instrument — a coerced woman, a stolen daughter — and turns on their refusal to become what they were built to be. Together the novels move from a war against a man to an argument with his legacy, and from the destruction of a villain to the harder work of deciding who is fit to guard the future.