Sheri Holman

In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When the surgeon Henry Chiver offers Gustine a different kind of work, she hopes to finally change her terrible circumstances. But Chiver was recently implicated in the famous case of Burke and Hare, who murdered beggars and sold their corpses for medical research....

His private life shattered amid rumors of his mother's witchcraft activities, Eddie Alley leaves his Depression-era Virginia hometown to begin a television career in New York and finds the past returning years later when he offers shelter to a homeless teen.