Arjuna Badger Press
THE SURGEON
He was refused a place at medical school by one mark. So he took the consolation prize — veterinary science — and stripped it for parts. Now he is the most charming man in any room on the Atlantic Seaboard, and the women he takes home wake up at noon with a lost evening, a glass of water beside the bed, and, weeks later, a scar that is no longer there. The detective who understands him is the one man in the Service who cannot afford to: a disgraced captain who once decided his own hands were the correction. A Cape crime novel about consent, perfection, and the compliment with a knife in it. ⚠ For adult readers. Book I of Captain Gideon Loots.
A note on the original
For adult readers. The Surgeon is a crime novel narrated, for half its length, from inside a predator — a man who drugs women and operates on them without their knowledge or consent. The book is deliberately seductive before it is appalling: that is its argument, not its indulgence. It is not a manual and not gore. By a binding rule of its own making it carries no drug doses, no routes, no sourcing and no surgical technique anywhere on the page; the horror is consent, autonomy and the self in the mirror, never procedure. There is no sexual violence in it, on the page or as implication. Its victims are people, with names, interiority and an after — the last word in the book belongs to one of them, not to him. The narrator's doctrine about race and beauty is his pathology, is monstrous, and is dismantled on the page by characters with the standing to do it. Mature themes throughout: non-consensual medical violation, lasting bodily harm, addiction and police violence.