The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake is a fast-paced historical novel set in Victorian-era England. With both romance and thriller-esque elements, Blake — a pseudonym for co-authors Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois — creates a convincing tale of legal and medical suspense, all in the midst of period-accurate gory descriptions of surgeries, home births and autopsies. Tying this background color together with the book's plot-driven qualities is an exploration of the medical advances and experimentation of the time.

The novel aims to follow these subjects from a feminist angle; the protagonist, Nora Beady, is a young woman practicing medicine without a license who must contend with the misogynistic society around her. Having been taken in by Dr. Horace Croft as a child after her family died of cholera, she has, under the doctor's tutelage, developed skills befitting a medical...