Things in Jars
London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and with her reputation in tatters, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist.
As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may well prove the most remarkable spectacle London has ever seen.
Things in Jars is an enchanting Victorian detective novel that explores what it is to be human in inhumane times.
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Jess Kidd
Jess Kidd’s writing dances on the edges of the seen and unseen, where the world of the living collides with the spectral. With a flair for blending the supernatural with vivid, character-driven narratives, Jess invites readers into hauntingly beautiful worlds where the past never quite lets go and the dead aren’t always silent.
Born in London and raised in County Mayo, Ireland, Jess’s love for storytelling began early, nurtured by a family steeped in rich folklore and Irish myth. But it was her own fascination with the liminal—those in-between spaces of life and death—that truly shaped her voice as a writer. This enchantment with the ghostly and the mysterious can be felt in her debut novel, Himself, which received critical acclaim and earned her a place among the brightest voices in contemporary fiction.

