This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Crime Doctor (1914) is a collection of eight interlinked detective episodes by E. W. Hornung, built around John Dollar, a disgraced physician who becomes the "crime doctor" — a medical man turned criminologist, forever probing the borderland where illness ends and wickedness begins. In "The Physician Who Healed Himself" we meet Dollar through his old friend Topham Vinson, and see the wound that made him what he is. "The Life-Preserver" opens a recurring thread: the beautiful and audacious Lady Vera Moyle, whose part in an Oxford Street riot has sent an innocent-looking convict named Alfred Croucher to the gallows, and whom Dollar hauls through a night of political risk-taking and pawnshop detection to win a reprieve. "A Hopeless Case" is the reformation of the very Croucher — a hopeless project that Dollar undertakes as penance. "The Golden Key" turns on bitter almonds and a cyanide death; "A Schoolmaster Abroad" carries the doctor to a Swiss winter resort where a forged prescription, a sabotaged toboggan and a desperate trepanning surgery bring him face to face with the suave villain Mostyn Scarth; "One Possessed" reverses a seeming case of demonic possession into a horror of murderous obsession within a decorated soldier's family; "The Doctor's Assistant" pits Dollar against arsonists and a locked tower room where Lady Vera's suffragist band has gone too far; and "The Second Murderer" brings Scarth, Croucher and Lady Vera to a final, razor-edge confrontation that settles the old fog-murder of Sergeant Simpkins. A classic Edwardian detective novel, rich in character, irony and Hornung's trademark blend of crime and compassion.
