LOST AND GONE FOREVER

Jack the Ripper meets his psychopathic equal in this macabre tale of late Victorian England.

Although Nevil Hammersmith, late of Scotland Yard, has the credentials to run his own detective agency, his only goal is to find Inspector Walter Day, his best friend and former colleague from the Yard. Day has been missing for almost a year, and his wife, Claire, is putting up the money for Hammersmith Discreet Enquiries, which, if not for employee Hatty Pitt, would be a one-case agency. She takes the initiative with the missing manager of the grandly refurbished and reopened Plumm’s Emporium, while her boss remains focused on Day. Despite all his searching, Hammersmith doesn’t know that practically under his nose, Day is wandering around in a dazed and amnesiac condition after months of captivity and mistreatment by a man he calls Jack. His jailer, who just released him, is better known as Jack the Ripper and has mesmerized Day into forgetting his wife and children and avoiding the police. Jack himself has eluded the members of a secret society that held him captive and tortured him in retribution for the pain he caused others. Now he’s killing the members one by one, and one of the few survivors, Claire’s father, hires a mysterious couple, known only as Mr. and Mrs. Parker, to kill Jack before he murders the entire society. Mrs. Parker is a particularly good choice for the job; her husband has to keep her in shackles at night so she won’t kill him just for the love of it. As pursuers and quarry converge on opulent Plumm’s, Jack is still one step ahead, with a secret weapon that only Walter Day can anticipate.

Grecian (The Harvest Man, 2015, etc.) spares no gruesome detail in this fifth installment about the hunt for England’s most famous serial killer. If you’re up for one more tale about him and you can stand the gore, you’re in for quite a ride.