Paris, November 1881. The body of Deputy Armand Delcourt is pulled from the Seine at dawn. The official verdict comes within hours: accidental drowning. Case closed.
Dr. Édouard Vassière arrives at the quay too late to matter - or so everyone assumes. But Vassière has spent ten years developing a theory that no one at the Academy of Medicine will accept: the human retina preserves the last image it ever captured. In a clandestine laboratory above a damp courtyard, he and his assistant Nour Benali, an Algerian-born chemist whose name appears on none of the papers she makes possible, have developed a method to reveal what a dead man saw in his final seconds.
What they find will put them both in danger.
A man's face. A white shirt collar. And the official badge of the French Republic.
As Inspector Maret closes in on a minister with everything to hide, the investigation draws in a journalist who watches from the shadows, a widow who has been waiting with a box of her husband's files, and a gallery of forgotten inventors whose discoveries the world refuses to admit exist: Mendel's laws of heredity, Léon Scott's recorded voices, Bertillon's identification system, Lister's antisepsis. Each of them right. Each of them erased.
The Dead Man's Gaze is a historical mystery about evidence buried, science stolen, and truth that refuses to stay dead. It is also the story of Nour Benali - who solved the crime, and whose name you will not find in any textbook.
For readers of intellectual historical mysteries and stories of women whose work was taken from them.
