Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

STRANGE PRACTICE

Vivian Shaw

A spectacular fantasy novel coming from debut Orbit author Vivian Shaw. It’s witty, fast-paced, and with an entirely original premise you’ve never seen before—the heroine who treats rather than fights the supernatural!
Meet Greta Helsing (yes, she’s a relation!), fast-talking doctor to the undead. Keeping the supernatural community not-alive and well in London has been her family’s specialty for generations.

After inheriting a highly specialized – and highly peculiar – medical practice, Dr. Helsing spends her days treating the undead for a host of ills: vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta’s been preparing for since childhood.

But when a sect of murderous monks starts attacking Londoners, undead and human alike, and terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use all her unusual skills to keep her supernatural clients – and the rest of London – safe.

Vivian Shaw was born in Kenya and spent her early childhood at home in England before relocating to the US at the age of seven. She has a BA in art history and an MFA in creative writing, and has worked in academic publishing and development while researching everything from the history of spaceflight to supernatural physiology. In her spare time, she writes fan fiction under the name of Coldhope.
Available products
Book

Published 2017-07-25 by Orbit

Book

Published 2017-07-25 by Orbit

Comments

What a splendid adventure this is - Dr. Greta Helming is a brilliant character, world-weary doctor on-call at all hours, sorting out the ills of the undead and trying to run her Harley Street practice without drawing too much (or any) attention to her patients from the living world ... a splendid new urban fantasy series.

An exceptional and delightful debut, in the tradition of Good Omens and A Night in the Lonesome October.

Read B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog’s cover reveal story, raving about our “pitch perfect cover” Read more...

Shaw's lively debut introduces a great cast of characters who should sustain this new series for many volumes to come.... Shaw brings her Victorian monsters into the modern age.

STRANGE PRACTICE is among B&N’s“ 21 Fantasy Debuts We Can’t Wait to Read in 2017”: "Sometimes you read about an upcoming book and the premise just grabs you—such is the case with the incredibly clever idea at the center of Shaw’s incipient Dr. Greta Helsing series... Doctor the undead? Murderous monks? If you’re not excited to discover how Shaw pulls it off, you’d better check yourself for a literary heartbeat. For our part, we can’t wait."

A satisfying and surprising read, with rich imagery, nuance, and real compassion for its characters—give Strange Practice a shot!

Readers who enjoy urban fantasy and are getting tired of cookie-cutter female protagonists will find this a pleasant surprise… An appropriately dark breath of fresh air.

Occasionally I can pick up a book, start to read and know within a couple of pages that I am going to be absolutely hooked. Strange Practice is a splendid case in point. Vampires, demons, ghouls, supernatural cults and all manner of inexplicable jiggery-pokery. What's not to love? I can only hope Vivian Shaw writes many more Greta Helming novels ... I can tell you now that if she does write more I'll be first in line to read them.

A darkly delicious adventure featuring a quirky new heroine. Strange Practice breathes new life into the undead.

Strange Practice is written with elegance, wit, and compassion. The prose is gorgeous, the wit is mordant, and the ideas are provocative. Also, there are ghouls.

This book is a joy to read.

Shaw excels at depictions of long-lived characters who combine old-school aesthetics with an appreciation of modern conveniences; readers will be amused by ancient entities coopting modern technology.

Enchanted me from the very first page ... I just couldn't put it down. When I say that there is nothing like this book out there, I mean it, and that's a damn good thing.

In Vivian Shaw'sStrange Practice,a charmingly unusual doctor and her charges keep the city of London from grave danger. In the process, they peel back the covers of familiar (and according to them, somewhat "libelous") stories to find that reality—especially with the undead—is more poignant and complex than it seems at first glance.An excellent adventure.

Strange Practice surprises and delights. It's completely different from anything I've read before. It ticks so many boxes: action, mystery, suspense, an exciting and different world adjacent to our own to name but a few. But the greatest elements of the book are the characters. They shine.

Readers will look forward to more of Greta's adventures. An imaginative, delightfully droll debut.

UK: Little Brown UK