First, Do No Harm
Vienna, late 17th Century. The city teeters on the precipice between the Western and Eastern halves of the “civilized world”, its people beset by reproachful neighbors on all sides. Less blinded than they or by the old reciprocal hatreds nursed by his fellow Viennese, minor nobleman Dietrich is more concerned with his physician’s passion to heal, and the uncorrupted pursuit of knowledge.
But when his discovery of a recently deceased man uncovers both the ravages of a new disease and evidence of foul play, the privileged cycle of the simple life is broken. The cadaver, wracked with dark decay and a desolation that no physician has ever seen, spreads its disease with a speed and virulence that confounds every mind great and small throughout the city. Curiously unaffected and now chasing both cure and killer, Dietrich races to halt the relentless march of death baptizing all in an unrelenting sacrament of fire.
Is the epidemic a natural phenomenon, or is it a supernatural struggle for the soul of man? And then there is Belial. Is he man or angel, and if the latter, of above, or from below? As Dietrich and his companions, including his headstrong sister and an ambiguous bishop, race against time to extract the truth from Belial and a cast of suddenly materializing plague doctors, Dietrich finds himself the center of a showdown between natural and otherworldly powers behind the sacristy drapes in the literal heart of Vienna that will require his every worldly resource to survive…
First, Do No Harm is a work of historical fiction which draws on the Great Plague of 1679, the bubonic plague that ravaged the city of Vienna towards the end of the 17th century, the real events surrounding it, and the local myths and superstitions of the time which may or may not be based in reality, mirroring the ambiguities of lived experience through time.
First, Do No Harm is the first published novel by K.S. Avard, author of Dead Noir and gatekeeper of the Avardiverse.
“The duality of humanity’s attempt to grasp the world with evolving hard science - not simply to buttress its understanding of the natural world, but to forestall its own very descent into insanity - and the mysticism of the prevailingly inexplicable that man cannot and is not equipped to grasp, finds its apotheosis in the apocalyptic showdown between human and otherworldly forces in First… Do No Harm. For this physician, a good, fun, and thought-provoking read.” - Yoav Eling, M.D.
First, Do No Harm
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