A J.F. Penn Storyworld
A detective who has lost everything. A psychic who sees too much.
Dark London is J.F. Penn's city turned inside out: the Hunterian Museum, old Bedlam, St Paul's, Westminster and the Shard, each hiding what respectable power does to the people it calls Other. Detective Jamie Brooke and reluctant psychic Blake Daniel work three cases across three books, and every landmark is real: you can walk the whole trilogy.
John Hunter's specimen jars, and the grave-robbing economy that priced bodies by the inch. The museum visit that seeded Desecration.
From the Tranquilizer chair to modern institutions: the real history of how London treated its 'mad', on the site of today's Imperial War Museum.
Sex workers licensed by a bishop for four centuries, denied burial in consecrated ground. The real graveyard, and the real memorial garden the novel foresaw.
Learn more →Sir Francis Dashwood's real tunnels at West Wycombe, and the secret society Desecration builds beneath them.
Reading the memory of objects, and the real Icelandic grimoire of saints, demons and runes behind Blake Daniel's inheritance.
The Janus head on Bankside: London as saint and sinner at once, the theme that runs through all three books.
Based on the Dark London trilogy (Book 1: Desecration)
When an heiress is found murdered among the specimen jars of London's Hunterian Museum, a grieving detective and a reluctant psychic who reads the memory of objects uncover a secret society that believes some bodies are property. Three cases across one dark London: the body, the mind, and the skin of the city itself.
