Ada, her lover, with a scientific turn of mind, who ran away from home in order to support Camille. Camille, its leader, who has some sympathy for the revolution’s ends, but not for its methods – not since both her parents went to the guillotine.

There are only four members of the Battalion of the Dead. Twists and turns and capers – and unexpected betrayals – ensue. But all the sides can bring pressure to bear which the small band of the Battalion of the Dead may not be able to resist. Handing her over to either royalists or representatives of the Committee of Public Safety, when it’s clear neither sees her as more than a tool, doesn’t sit well with her rescuers. Olympe isn’t an aristocrat’s daughter, though: instead, she’s a young woman with a mysterious and terrible ability to manipulate electricity, and as such, someone that all factions see as a potential weapon, or a potential threat. This time, the person they’re trying to rescue is a young woman called Olympe, ostensibly the daughter of the duc de l’Aubespine. (It sets itself, in fact, days before the intensification of executions post-June-10th that led to Robespierre’s overthrow.) The novel opens with a balloon-flight above the Conciergerie prison, part of a daring plan to facilitate an escape: the main characters are all part of a group, the Battalion of the Dead, dedicated to breaking individuals out of prison and saving them from the guillotine.

That puts it in the height of the Terror, after the execution of the Hébertists and the Dantonists and well after the Law of Suspects. The novel dates itself as Prairial, Year II (May-June 1794 in the Gregorian calendar) and reaches its culmination on June 8th, with the Festival of the Supreme Being. The advance praise may have had the effect of setting my expectations too high, because I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I’d anticipated – but in this Year of Our Pandemic, I’m not at all sure whether the fault (as it were) is not in the work, but in myself, that I don’t have the capacity for whole-hearted enjoyment of caper-esque fun.ĭangerous Remedy sets itself in Paris in the middle of the French Revolution.

Dangerous Remedy, Kat Dunn ( Head of Zeus 978-1-78954-364-3, £12.99, 430pp, hc) August 2020.ĭangerous Remedy is a much-discussed debut novel from translator and podcast host Kat Dunn: I say much discussed, because I first heard of it in flattering terms as ”LGBT fantasy meets The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and I’ve heard much in its favour since.

Dangerous Remedy by Kat Dunn