Award-winning author Laura Joh Rowland is back with the seventh in her
critically acclaimed Victorian mystery series in which Sarah Bain
Barrett is pitted against a true-crime serial killer who may have ties
to Jack the Ripper.
London, April 1891. When the severed torso of a woman washes up on
the bank of the river Thames, London believes a serial killer from the
past has struck again. Crime photographer and investigator Sarah Bain
Barrett is on the scene with her friends Mick O'Reilly and Lord Hugh
Staunton. This is their chance to solve a grisly cold case and deliver a
monster to belated justice, with help from Sarah's husband Detective
Sergeant Thomas Barrett; her sister Sally Albert, an intrepid newspaper
reporter; and Hugh's psychologist, Dr. Joshua Lewes, who's a pioneer in
the new science of criminal profiling. But the opportunity brings
troubles galore: Sarah and her husband can't agree on what direction
their inquiries should take. Barrett favors concentrating on two shady
characters he knows from his days a a patrol constable in Whitechapel,
while Sarah suspects the charismatic leader of a polygamous religious
sect from which at least one woman has gone missing. Their discord
threatens not only the investigation but their marriage.
To complicate matters, Sarah's bitter enemy, Inspector Reid, is leading
the police's hunt for the killer they're calling the Torso Murderer.
Obsessed with the Ripper case and his own failure to solve it, he thinks
the Ripper and the Torso Murderer are one and the same person--a notion
that could steer the police investigation disastrously off course. Hot
in pursuit of the killer, Reid is also hell-bent on discovering what
Sarah and company have been hiding about the Ripper.
The Torso Murder case threatens to expose a dangerous truth, tear apart
Sarah's close-knit band of comrades, and send them to the gallows before
they can put the killer out of action.
