In 1871 Philadelphia, policeman Wilton McCleary notices the beautiful colored girl on the streetcar. He can't take his eyes off her, and when she is targeted by a group of bullies intent on teaching her a colored woman's place, he charges in. This is McCleary's introduction to Arabella Cole. Arabella is an oddity, an educated black woman, raised abroad and now one of the rare females studying medicine at the Women's Medical College. And as it turns out, Arabella is connected to the case McCleary is investigating.

Women have been disappearing in Philadelphia; young colored women. Most were prostitutes and thus among those the police consider expendable, but when the daughter of an African Methodist minister joins the ranks of the missing, the police are forced to take notice. The case is not important enough to assign to a detective, so it is given to McCleary with little expectation of his coming up with any tangible results.

When the body of a Negro woman is pulled from the river, McCleary is called to see if he can identify the body. The dead woman is unknown to him, but as it turns out, she is known to Arabella. When jewelry is found linking the dead woman to one of McCleary's disappearance cases, he finally has the first clue that will lead him inexorably to a truth more horrible than he ever could have imagined.

The Resurrectionist seems to be an odd hybrid; aspects of the story and the hero's frequent physical encounters with the forces of evil would make it seem to lean toward the "thriller" category, but the style is so dry as to remove most sources of suspense. Neither the mystery nor the characters particularly grabbed my interest, and I never really cared what was happening or how the story was going to end. The depth of historical detail is both interesting and impressive, but otherwise the narrative never truly comes to life.

--Jeri Wright