Fish, Blood and Bone

Leslie Forbes

From Shelf: The 2001 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

This is the story of how three families spanning two centuries and two countries - India and Britain - come together when an investigation of their pasts reveals forgotten crimes.

Fish, Blood and Bone is Leslie Forbes' brilliant second novel. When Claire Fleetwood, a young American forensic photographer, inherits a large house and garden in London's East End from relatives she never knew she had, she imagines it will be a slice of the English dream. But after the brutal murder of her best friend Sally Rivers, Claire learns that her inheritance involves more than she wanted or bargained for. Desperate to find a motive for her friend's death, or at least someone to blame for the things that can befall ordinary people, Claire is impelled to join a scientific expedition led by her cousin Jack Ironstone, one of the men she suspects of being responsible for Sally's murder. Her journey leads from Jack the Ripper's claustrophobic Whitechapel to the Fleetwoods' murky roots in India's opium trade and the wild 'paradise' valleys of Tibet. It parallels a route taken during Britain's great 19th-century triangulation of the Himalayas by Claire's distant relative Magda Ironstone and a mysterious Indian botanist. As Claire painstakingly reconstructs a triangular love affair she imagines took place, the contemporary story is overtaken to deadly effect by Magda's.Written with all the sophistication and intelligence that was so dazzling in Bombay Ice, in Fish, Blood and Bone Leslie Forbes weaves together a mysterious story of three families, a love affair and a series of murders into a wonderfully haunting novel about hidden pasts and forgotten crimes.

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