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It is 1891 and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Ripper murders when Inspector Lestrade (that'ferret-like' anti-hero so often out-detected by the legendary Sherlock Holmes) is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Chine.
But this is only the start of the nightmare. It is merely the beginning of a series of killings so brutal, so bizarre and, apparently, so random, that only a warped genius - and a master of disguise - could be responsible. Even when Lestrade pieces together the extraordinary pattern behind the crimes from the anonymous poems sent after each murder, he is no closer to knowing the identity of the sinister, self-styled 'Agrippa', the 'great, long, red-legg'd scissor-man'. It becomes a very personal battle and Lestrade's desperate race to avert the next death in the sequence takes him all over the country, from London to the Pennines and back, resulting in a portfolio of suspects which covers the entire range of late-Victorian society.
M J Trow whirls from ballroom to bar-room, from vicarage to spiritualist gathering, from the studio of the celebrated Alma-Tadema to 221 B Baker Street with spell-binding panache. In this witty, original and often hilarious pastiche he keeps the reader guessing right up to the dazzling and ingenious denouement.
book reviews
- Writer’s Block Magazine (Canada)
Trow is at his wicked best when poking fun at the Holmes legacy – you won’t believe how Holmes really died! A must read for all Sherlock Holmes fans. - Marcel Berlins, The Times
'Smarting from humiliating deductive defeats by Sherlock Holmes, Lestrade of the Yard belies the Great Detective's opinion of him by taking on Jack the Ripper and unravelling a succession of doggerel-accompanied murders. Splendidly shaken cocktail of Victorian fact and fiction as Holmes and Watson join Tennyson, Swinburne, Alma-Tadema and the Prince of Wales in helping Lestrade's trawl. Witty, literate and great fun.' - Police
The joke's a good one, and it lasts all the way through the book because Mr Trow is just too good a writer to overdo it.' - Matthew Coady, The Guardian
The policeman so frequently patronised by the Great Detective solves ten bizarre killings, is twice seduced and finally saved from death as a circus ring's human cannonball. This is murder as vaudeville with Tennyson, Swinburne and Wilde joining the crosstalk. It's a gas.'
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