Jess Kidd’s first novel, Himself (2016), was the story of a murderous secret that struggles to stay buried in a 1970s County Mayo village populated with ghosts. In Things in Jars, Kidd maintains the themes of the undead walking among the living and of something awful struggling under the surface of things, but she sets this highly imaginative tale of anatomical abominations, crazed surgeons and mythical creatures in 1860s London.

Bridie Devine is a Wicklow-born, pipe-smoking, gun-toting detective, a Celtic heroine straight out of the feverish imagination of Wilkie Collins. She goes undercover by disguising herself as a man, secretly spies on surgeons and explores the world around her with gusto. Her sidekick is the ghost of an