Grave robbers, cotton mills, true crime make Angie Dicken's "The Yellow Lantern" a must-read

"Fiction Based on Strange-But-True History"

is a sure way to get my attention. In "The Yellow Lantern," Angie Dicken illuminates the morbid business of grave diggers stealing cadavers to advance medical science. I love fiction that preserves historical information most of us never learn in school. "The true crime of body snatching was more rampant than rare throughout history," Dicken writes in an afterword to the reader. "I was surprised to come across a case where several stolen bodies supplied an entire medical society, but more disturbing was the fact that some body snatchers would even murder for the chance of payment."

The truth really is stranger than fiction.

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The Yellow Lantern: True Colors: Historical Stories of American Crime
by Angie Dicken | Barbour Publishing, Inc. | Barbour Books | True Crime
Pub Date 01 Aug 2019

I can believe robbers would kill people

to supply doctors with cadavers. I'd never have believed doctors would torture and kill humans for medical research, but there's Mengele and the Nazis. Ok, fine: I accept the premise of Dicken's villain being a doctor who'd kill healthy young people for his research.

Dicken also weaves in a cast of young women exploited as workers in a cotton mill, adding another layer of historical horror stories to this thriller/romance novel. I love the descriptions of the mill, e.g.,

... a fine snow of cotton bits lingered in the air. She was in a sort of storm, one where the thunder banged from the machines, and the particles in the air floated without chill or wind.

Dicken is good at plotting, pacing, tension, conflict, and suspense. Fans of the romance genre will love this story. I found the tropes of the genre distracting--e.g., handsome factory manager Braham Taylor frequently breathless in the presence of Josephine Clayton, aka Josie Clay, mysterious new cotton mill employee--but I kept reading. There are plenty of positives that allow me to recommend this novel.

The young women and girls working in the factory are well-drawn. Their plight is all too authentic. As Molly, a coworker, tells Josie, "We've got a lot of talent in these girls. Some come from poor families and others from families who demand their sons receive an education using their wages. We might not have the status to go off to prestigious schools and find glorious apprenticeships, but we are hard workers with the most important thing of all...Freedom."

How Josie ends up in a cotton mill is a plot twist I will not spoil for other readers. Her natural talent and her training as a healer come in handy when there are on-the-job injuries, but this also gets her in trouble because she abandons her work station to tend to employees in need of immediate medical attention. Ridiculous as that sounds, overbearing and punitive bosses like hers have real-life precedents. Fans of Claire in the "Outlander" series will find much to love about Josie and her knowledge of herbal remedies.

Josie's passion for healing also helps account for her part in helping a doctor acquire cadavers:

"Imagine the discoveries that might be made." Josie understood how important discoveries were--she'd longed for them when her mother was ill. Her widowed father and his foolish debts are the main reason Josie gets caught up with body snatchers. I've always had trouble with the trope of protagonists allowing others to be harmed rather than see their own loved ones suffer, but, ok, it's a trope. Josie will sink into subterfuge and grave robbing all to protect her father. I don't buy the helpless victim excuse, but it does provide for the drama that comes straight from real life. E.g.,
women posing as mourners were hired to keep watch for the gravediggers, Dicken tells the reader, and many "factual tidbits are laced in Josephine's tale." In one scene, the gravedigger tells Josie, "Sometimes they'll lace the dirt with straw so it's more difficult for grave robbers to shovel. In Boston, they've even made cages to go on top of the dirt. Sawing through creates quite a ruckus for the snatchers." (Read the story, and you'll see how the yellow lantern of the title comes into play.) By 1815, body snatching was declared illegal.

Most people avoid thinking about how med students learn and who might be on that table getting dissected, but in my early 20s, I donated my body to science. I have not un-done that despite the protests of my children. As a society, our squeamishness about dead bodies has also kept organ donation to a minimum, to the point that the sale of organs from live donors has led to illegal, unethical trafficking. Any novels and movies addressing this subject are high on my "must-read" list.

Medical knowledge in the early 1800s wasn't what it is today, and doctors sometimes mistook the comatose for the dead. The stethoscope didn't exist until 1846, and it took some time for doctors everywhere to have one. Go online, and you can find endless nightmarish stories of people buried alive. In 1889, a Kentucky man exhumed the body of his wife, Octavia Smith Hatcher, when others in the community revived after being considered dead. The lining of her coffin had been shredded, her fingernails were bloody, and her face was frozen in a shriek of terror.

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I've held back (believe it or not!) on saying negative things

about the novel, but for me, the tropes of the romance genre add distractions rather than value to the story, and so does the prose style. Metaphor and idiom seem to escape Millennials, even those who are trained writers, and even editors. E.g., "His chin pushed up his lips into a deeply set frown." Huh? (At least Dicken and her editors know not to hyphenate after an -ly word.) Call me a crabby last-century English teaching major, but I wince at "fresh" prose that tries too hard, so to speak. This:

Sorrow tiptoed beneath his starched white shirt.

Her eyes grew wide. Sapphire bobbles searched his face.

(Proofreaders, note: Bauble, not bobble, is a small, showy trinket or decoration. Editors, blue eyes as baubles is a distraction. "Comradery" is spelled camaraderie.)

She then tilted her face toward him, gave him a curt smile, and stared. His mouth went dry. A tremble seized his chest, foreign and unwelcome. He took in a jagged breath and stared back at her, searching beyond the light that washed her face and trying to determine his next words.

Fear laced the back of her neck.

Ok, there was a lot of that kind of writing, but what really makes me wince and cringe is the sad history of medicine and the horrific casualties of workers in human industry.

Just an aside: I saw a TV show about the bodies in the basement of a house in London where Benjamin Franklin lived for twenty years returning to Pennsylvania to support the American Revolution. His friend and protege William Hewson studied medicine and anatomy in an era when society believed it a sin to disturb the bodies of the dead. Med students had to resort to grave digging or hiring grave robbers to unearth cadavers for illicit classrooms held in private residences. During recent repairs on Franklin’s old London residence, workers discovered human remains in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden. Forensic scientists concluded the bones of fifteen bodies, six of them children, dated back to Franklin’s time there. Why Were 15 Bodies Buried in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement?

In all, the story of Josie Clay and Braham Taylor is not my kind of romance, but the real-life details that inform the narrative make this novel a must-read.

DISCLAIMER: I received an ARC of this novel via NetGalley. I do not know the author or the publisher personally.

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Angie Dicken credits her love of story to reading British literature during life as a military kid in Cambridgeshire, England. Now living in the U.S., she's an ACFW member, a blog contributor to the Writer's Alley, a baseball mom, and a self-proclaimed foodie. You can connect with her on social media and learn about upcoming releases at www.angiedicken.com.

More from the True Colors Series

The White City by Grace Hitchcock (March 2019)
The Pink Bonnet by Liz Tolsma (June 2019)

ISBN 9781643520834

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