The Pennyroyal Ledger

A Victorian Medical Thriller

In the shadows of Victorian London, survival is a crime. And Katrin Hess is the only one committing it.

Whitechapel, 1880. By day, Katrin Hess is a quiet, scarred woman running a modest apothecary, dispensing cough syrups and headache powders to the poor. But when the gaslights dim and the front door locks, the back door opens.

For fifteen years, Katrin has operated in the gray space between medicine and the law, providing the desperate women of the East End with the one thing society refuses them: control over their own bodies. She is meticulous.

She is discreet. She is invisible.

Until the morning a single, machine-stamped letter slides under her door: I know what you are doing.

Suddenly, Katrin’s carefully constructed world begins to fracture. Her mentor, a celebrated physician whose reputation she built from the shadows, has grown desperate. A relentless police inspector has begun to notice the patterns in her ledger. And a ruthless industrialist has realized that Katrin’s secret network isn’t just a crime—it’s a market waiting to be cornered.

Trapped between a law that wants to imprison her and a corporation that wants to own her, Katrin must decide how far she is willing to go to protect her work.

In a city built on secrets, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is refuse to hide.

Perfect for fans of The Lost Apothecary, The Alienist, and Penny Dreadful, this atmospheric medical thriller explores the price of silence and the weight of a legacy written in invisible ink.