Richard Ayre, Shadow of the Knife (Burning Chair Limited 2021)
Two years since Jack the Ripper stalked the streets. Dr Carter ‘Jigsaw’ Jarman is consulted on a murder, Eliza Cotton, and another, Molly Harnath, both prostitutes killed by a single slice through the throat. Then, the first body goes missing from the morgue, apparently incinerated by order of the police, yet there was no signature on the form.
For detective Jonas Handy, himself the son of a prostitute who died when he was 8, the cases strike close to home.
They check our Molly’s former employ, a matchstick factory owed by Thomas Villiers. The Villiers’ servant Ellie tells Jarman’s driver Curmudgeon that the master has gentlemen friends and women to the house for ‘deviant’ parties when Mrs Villiers is away. And the first victim Eliza had also worked at the match factory, both given jobs as ‘charity’ cases.
Is the Ripper back? Young news reporter Edward Ely believes so. Jarman thinks it’s a copycat killer.
Now, a third victim, literally torn to pieces.
And there it was again, another anti-Semitic slogan. Similar to the Ripper case’s enigmatic ‘The Juwes…’ graffito, a pamphlet was distributed around, stating, ‘The Jewish monster has returned…’ People suspect a police coverup, and the investigators have to flee from an angry vigilante mob, which resulted in three deaths and Callow sustaining an injury to the skull. While the riot was raging, the corpse of the third victim goes missing. And Ely turns up dead, murdered.
Ely has is eye on Villiers. Ely receives a threatening letter, delivered to his home, warning him to ‘stay away from V’, signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. A barmaid informs them that the third victim was Hetty Kennedy, who that night had ‘sweetened herself up’ for an important date. The carter who found the body comes forward, saying he saw someone. Jarman and Curmudgeon travel to Dorking to see Mrs Villiers at her country estate. ‘My husband is not a good man,’ she says. They are informed by Grace at the boarding house that Hetty as well was one of Villiers’ ‘charity’ cases, yet her name has been erased from the office ledger.
The backstory of Jarman’s late wife is a trifle clumsily told, a shame since he is the main protagonist and it’s so pertinent to his character. Jarman realises the paper the ‘Ripper’ letter was on came from the match factory. They arrest the clerk Robert Clinch. Clinch is murdered in his cell, then Grace. Jarman thinks it’s two killers—the three prostitutes by a deranged madman, the others by a methodical professional assassin. Assistant Commissioner Montgomery Pence is implicated. Susannah Villiers reveals that her husband’s ‘parties’ ceased while the Ripper killings were happening. Handy burgles the factory and finds the ledger listing the names of the attendees to Villiers’ parties. Pence reveals to us the identity of the second killer before the investigators have a chance to discover it, which I thought was rather a waste. There are multiple bad guys, here—the original Ripper, the sick slasher of the prostitutes, the methodical assassin, ‘the dark man’ and the ‘Guardian’.
This is very well written, a cut above the usual detective thriller. The author deals well with suspense (a good thing for a detective novel), and one really feels the deprivation and filth of Whitechapel and the horror of the crime scenes.
Every now and again there is an aside in the voice of ‘the dark man’. Unlike many detective novels, where the murderer is just portrayed as a bad ‘un, the psychopathy of this murderer is believable, I thought. Gradually it dawns on us who it is. I rather thought the suspects were guessed too easily by the investigators. A little more than halfway through the book, it looks like the crime is solved. But Pence suspends Handy from duty. Jarman and Handy work out who the original Ripper was.
Richard Ayre is the author of several thrillers.
This review was written for Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 
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