We RATS have been reading historical fiction lately and I decided that I should wrench myself out of medieval England and read something different. I came across The Women of Magdalene by Rosemary Poole-Carter set in post Civil War Lousiana. Certainly something different. It involves a young doctor, estranged from his family, who is walking to Magdalene, an asylum for women, to take a position as the house doctor. He has been given the job as a favor from one of his father’s former colleagues. On the way he finds the body of a woman in a creek. She is one of the inmates and he arrives carrying her body and thus begins his career at Magdalene.