The Murder Organ: Love and madness on the frontiers of science

0/5 ( ratings)

In the early days of modern forensics, a schizophrenic phrenologist struggles to bring science and certainty to the beat-them-until-they-confess school of police interrogation.
Growing up in frontier San Antonio, Henry Pender has a persistent sense that his memories are jumbled and his life's narrative disjointed. At first fatherless, then motherless, then orphaned, he begins a lifelong quest to learn what is wrong with him, to understand the functioning of his disordered brain, and to pursue any possible palliative or cure.
After spending several years with a Viennese pharmacist who employs him, Henry has developed a growing faith in science, and an approximate knowledge of pharmacology. He plunges into both with a convert's zeal, working his way through the opioid family while studying Phrenology -- the belief that a person's character, and perhaps behavior, can be read in the contours of his skull. Phrenology had correctly posited that different skills and abilities are governed by different parts of the brain, but went astray when it supposed the qualities manifested themselves in cranial bumps or recessions.
Henry becomes a widely-recognized forensic phrenologist, assisting police investigations and testifying as an expert witness. But, like his science, he is proceeding confidently and methodically in the wrong direction, A disastrous marriage and an encounter with a god-like phrenologist-cum-brain surgeon drive Pender into the arms of laudanum, which relieves his condition but sends his life on a continuing downhill slide.
When Henry's ex-wife returns and asks for his help in locating her missing brother, his belief that he can still win her back overwhelms his unsuitability for the job, and he accepts. Traveling the symbolic distance from San Antonio, where free-range cattle are rounded up and put on the train, and Chicago, where they are slaughtered, he walks into the middle of a controversial murder trial involving a conspiracy of police, judges, and the city's business and political elite. His last illusions about science and reason crushed by reality at its harshest, Henry now comes face to face with the destination he’s been heading for all along .