While a young medical student at Edinburgh, Arthur Conan Doyle famously studied under the remarkable Dr Joseph Bell. Taking this as a starting point, David Pirie has woven a compelling thriller which partners Bell and Doyle as pioneers in criminal investigation, exploring the strange underworld of violence and sexual hypocrisy running below the surface of the Victorian era.The Patient's Eyes takes place in Portsmouth where the impoverished young Arthur Doyle opens his first medical practice. There he is puzzled by the symptoms presented by Heather Grace, a sweet young woman whose parents have died tragically several years before. Heather has a strange eye complaint, but is also upset by a visions of a phantom cyclist who vanishes as soon as he is followed. This enigma, however, is soon forgotten as Doyle finds himself embroiled in more threatening events - including the murder of a rich Spanish businessman - events that call for the intervention of the eminent Dr Bell But despite coming to Doyle's aid, perversely Dr Bell considers the murder of Senor Garcia a rather unimportant diversion from the real criminal affair in Doyle's letter summoning him south: the matter of the patient's eyes and the solitary cyclist Tense, dramatic and unputdownable, The Patient's Eyes marks the debut of a brilliant new crime writer.

Genre: Mystery