Book review: The Way Of All Flesh, by Ambrose Parry

The Way Of All Flesh begins, as so many hackneyed crime novels have done before, with a man standing over the dead body of a young female prostitute; “just another deid hoor” as a character remarks later. But we also begin with a young man’s fear, guilt and sadness, and an apology from a narrator for beginning thus, both neatly subverting the cliché. We also begin with a scene of Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1847 described so richly we feel the chill of Evie’s corpse and smell the middens that medical student Will Raven picks his way through after leaving the building.