New Release —THE PEST HOUSE by Clay More — Giveaway!

Twisted Knee, Ohio, 1866

Nothing could ever damp down the smell of the pest house.

Especially not in the sweltering heat of summer.

It was a strange, stomach-twisting smell that wafted from the two chimneys that belched smoke most days when the place was full of patients. And even when the smoke was dispelled by the wind the odor hung like a miasma around the old two-storied timber building a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the town of Twisted Knee.

But the smell was only a prelude to the evil that took place in the old building that housed the wounded, the diseased, and the hopeless. Though Doctor Cutler had his own faults, murder was not one of them—and that was going to be the death of him...

EXCERPT

     For those who had never ventured inside to visit a relative or friend the odor conjured up near-hellish images of Sister Fowler or one of the Twisted Knee Ladies of Charity who nursed the sick, or of the orderlies who carried patients in or bodies out to the attached mortuary, feeding the fires with clothing, bandages or bed linen that had gotten stained with blood or body fluids. And sometimes it smelled even worse…and folks forced themselves to stop imagining.

No one came near it unless they were unfortunate enough to come down with one or other of the less savory medical conditions that scared the bejeebers out of folks. It had a reputation as a place where you went to die.

     That was the image of the pest house at any rate, when old Doc Silas Jackson was the only medical man in Twisted Knee. Despite his age and his apparent lack of success in keeping his patients alive, the sixty-year-old, skeletally thin doctor in the stovepipe hat and stiff-collared shirts was held in affection and esteem by the good folk of the town. After all, as he regularly regaled patients and friends, he had given the town the best years of his life and had passed up the commission as a major that he had been offered during the war, just so that he could go on tending to his friends in town.

     Then Doctor Bruce Cutler came along and set up his shingle in town and the two doctors agreed to share the onerous task of looking after the pest house. Doctor Jackson, as the senior and already established physician, retained complete charge and responsibility for the lower ward and the single cubicle rooms leading off it, while Bruce was given charge of the upstairs ward.

     But Doctor Bruce Cutler was a different sort of doctor from Doctor Silas Jackson, and it was not long before they had the first of many very public fallings out, mainly about medicine and the way the pest house was run. The result was that they hated each other with a passion. And everyone knew it.

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