Gothic and irresistibly gory, this historical thriller from Genard centers on psychically gifted Scotland Yard physician Dr. William Scarlet, introduced in Red Season, and a killing spree in the most notorious neighborhood in Victorian London: the sinister slums of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where hardscrabble peasants and sex workers dwell. The first victim is a fallen woman, Mary Ann Nichols, murdered and mutilated in the dead of night. Another five people are killed in the succeeding weeks—three women slaughtered in a similar nature, and two men killed with less precision, dismembered and ripped apart. Scarlet attempts to trace a pattern and connect these and more macabre murders, believing a centrally important clue can unravel the motives of the crime and the suspect—or suspects?—behind it.

Genard excels in conjuring the darkest alleyways, grisly wounds, and wounded hearts of London’s East End, with a doomsday wordplay that will either disturb or delight, based on readers’ inclinations. Just as sickening as the poverty and the incisions in the women peddling quick “Tuppenny Upright”s are the grotesque descriptions of the slaughter of men that The Society of Supernatural and Psychic Research surmises, contrary to conventional serial murder, are either animalistic attacks from zoo escapers, or they perhaps involve something more ghoulish. Perspective chapters immerse readers in the minds of victims and residents as Scarlet investigates, encountering the kind of secretive organization, Friends of the Daughters of Night (purportedly concerned “with bettering the lots of unfortunate women”), that readers crave in Ripper tales.

While the tone and brisk pursuit of clues will feel familiar to fans of historical crime thrillers, Genard sets the Scarlet series apart with frank descriptions of life as it was lived, a lively fascination in Victorian esotericism—with an eye for the occult and attempts to achieve a redemptive transcendence— and the teasing possibility that, for all the case’s resemblance to the epochal Ripper crimes, something more may be afoot. This thriller of a seamy, seething London has bite.

Takeaway: Victorian London serial killer thriller with a cultish, supernatural twist.

Comparable Titles: Lyndsey Faye’s Dust and Shadow, Sarah Pinborough’s Mayhem.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A