Excerpt from The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Baker shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. "Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before."

"How can you be sure?"

From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.

Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colorful intricacies of skin and gut.

"The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see." His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into hideous grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. "I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more."

He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. "Do you see?"

I looked at the man's eyeball. "What is it I am to see?" I said.

"The iris is white," said Baker, reaching for the next man's eyelid, this time with a tender finger. "As is this one. And this." He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. "Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here." He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.

I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man's boldness with the ways of death.

"In Bologna the tradition is more—more practical than our own," said the physician, noting our unease. "They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. If you gentlemen are in any way interested in this line of inquiry I recommend the Anatomia of Mondino de' Liuzzi, a surgical master at Bologna some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—"

"Not hanged, then," I said, less impressed by the man's eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. "So how, in your learned view, were these men killed?"

He smiled modestly, raised the second finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found an indentation to the left of the victim's heart, a mark I hadn't noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.

"Stabbed?" guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man's chest.

"Run through with a short sword, I'd wager," I said, walking down the row of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy but not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.

"Not a blade, I think," said Baker, his voice hollow and low. "These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them." He looked up at Strode. "With your permission, Master Strode?"

Excerpted from The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger. Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Holsinger. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.