DRAGON RIPPER

A young, aspiring detective—the sister of Sherlock Holmes—attempts to solve a string of murders with a new friend, the daughter of Jack the Ripper, in this novel.

A prostitute is brutally murdered in an alley outside an opium den in London, the body so mutilated the police quickly suspect the infamous Jack the Ripper. But Madeleine Barquist, who works in the horse stable for the Metropolitan Police, knows better—her father, now dead, was the notorious murderer in question. In fact, her father’s assistant in ghastly cruelty, Bert Cranston, has returned to town after a prolonged absence, obsessed with recovering a journal that belonged to Madeleine’s father and that potentially incriminates him. She worries that he’s responsible for the murder and a similar one that follows on its heels. Madeleine befriends Astraia Holmes, the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, who notices at the first crime scene three long cuts made in a wall, apparently with symbolic intention, and something that resembles Chinese calligraphy. To confuse matters, a witness claims to have seen an “enormous snake-like creature” in the area at the time of the murder. In this series opener, Bacon skillfully combines the almost comic precociousness of the two protagonists with a genuinely chilling murder mystery. The introduction of Sherlock Holmes terrifies Madeleine, who zealously guards her shameful secret, a predicament movingly depicted by the author. But the connection ultimately drawn to the Chinese underworld punctures the story’s bubble of plausibility, and Bacon’s writing can be laboriously overwrought and a touch precious, as in this passage from Madeleine’s perspective: Astraia “looked at me with an insipid smile, a perfect illustration of the old chestnut regarding oral butter melting.” Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable detective tale, somehow both companionably innocuous and thrilling.

A gripping crime drama, game but edgy.