Strange Practice – Vivian Shaw

Meet Greta Helsing, fast-talking doctor to the undead. Keeping the supernatural community not-alive and well in London has been her family’s specialty for generations.

Greta Helsing inherited the family’s highly specialized, and highly peculiar, medical practice. In her consulting rooms, Dr. Helsing treats the undead for a host of ills – vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta’s been groomed for since childhood.

Until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice, and her life.

Meet Dr Greta Helsing, medic to the… differently alive residents of London. She looks after the capital’s supernatural inhabitants, be they vampire or vampyre (and yes, there is a difference!), ghoul, mummy or demon. The trouble is, someone is going around killing people. And that simply will not do. Dr Helsing (her family dropped the ‘van’ many years ago) must join forces with some of her patients to sort it all out.

What a splendid adventure this is – Dr Greta Helsing is a brilliant character, world-weary doctor on-call at all hours, sorting out the ills of the undead and trying to run her Harley Street practice without drawing too much (or any) attention to her patients from the living world.

The monks are delightfully evil and horribly focused on the job in hand. The underlying mystery is nicely twisty, and Dr Helsing has a splendidly quirky coterie of undead friends to aid her on her quest – Fastitocolon and Ruthven were particular favourites, and not forgetting Sir Francis. Of the supporting characters, I’d love to find out more about Anna and Dez, Greta’s helpers in her rather peculiar practice. Here’s hoping they’ll all be back for book 2 in what promises to be a splendid new urban fantasy series.

Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw will be published on July 25th 2017 by Orbit. You can find Vivian on twitter @ceruleancynic. Many thanks to Nazia at Orbit for the review copy (and the sweets – she knows the way to a bookblogger’s heart!)