Local author A. Rae Dunlap reads from new novel at Speakeasy Bookmarket

A lively crowd filled Speakeasy Bookmarket on Saturday night, January 18, to hear local author A. Rae Dunlap read from her new novel, The Resurrectionist. The book is a mixture of historical fiction, true crime, action and romance, but Dunlap likes to think of it as a coming-of-age saga. It is set in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1828, as an unfortunate medical student is drawn into the illicit trade in human remains to fund his studies.

Dunlap went to Scotland to research the book, learning about the forces that drove the grisly trade and the measures taken to combat it. Edinburgh was a center of medical education during the 18th and 19th centuries. This created a demand for cadavers for anatomical study, but the law only allowed the dissection of executed murderers, who were few. Private anatomy schools sprang up, offering students a guaranteed body for their studies, with the invisible hand of the market providing the specimens by any means necessary.

Dunlap’s day job is editing trailers for Disney. She came to Idyllwild on a first date with her future husband. During the pandemic, she walked the empty streets with the idea for her first novel running through her head. Speakeasy proprietress Dyani Brunner offered her the shop’s tiny attic as a workspace, and for a while, Dunlap became the “attic ghost.”

Read more at: ARaeDunlap.com. The Resurrectionist is published by Kensington Publishing corp.