The Ripper has been such a persistent inspiration in the mystery and horror genres that no anthology can truly be...
Truth in labeling alert: Penzler’s latest plus-sized anthology differs sharply from volumes like Maxim Jakubowski’s The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper because it doesn’t focus mainly on the world’s most famous real-life serial killer but rather on his fictional epigones.
Penzler does begin with 136 pages of documentation from the 1888 murder spree, reviews of the slim but harrowing evidence, and historical speculations about the Ripper’s identity. But his heart is really in showcasing the fictional afterlives of Saucy Jack, and here he leaves no stone unturned. Among the 52 selections are classic tales by Cleveland Moffett, Thomas Burke, Isak Dinesen, Anthony Boucher, and Edward D. Hoch and brand-new stories by Anne Perry (a Victorian woman wonders if her husband might be Jack), Jeffery Deaver (a pastiche that blurs the line between fiction and history), Loren D. Estleman (a Ripper type terrorizes postwar Detroit), Daniel Stashower (an enterprising group’s staging of “the Ripper experience” runs into predictable complications), Stephen Hunter (Jack arrives in hell), and, most haunting of all, Lyndsay Faye (a posthumous memoir by one of the Ripper’s victims). As in his earlier anthologies for Vintage (The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries, 2014, etc.), Penzler’s keynote virtue is exhaustiveness. Readers will find three novel-length tales by Boris Akunin (The Decorator, pitting Erast Petrovich Fandorin against a Moscow Ripper), Ellery Queen (A Study in Terror, a surprisingly successful tale pairing the Ripper with Sherlock Holmes), and Marie Belloc Lowndes (the memorably creepy The Lodger). Completists will note with pleasure that Penzler includes not only The Lodger, but the Lowndes short story on which it is based and not only Robert Bloch’s tour de force “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” but “A Toy for Juliette,” the futuristic sequel Bloch provided at Harlan Ellison’s request, and “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” Ellison’s sequel to Bloch’s sequel.
The Ripper has been such a persistent inspiration in the mystery and horror genres that no anthology can truly be exhaustive. But if you finish this monumental collection and find yourself with an appetite for more, consider seeking professional help.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-97113-0
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
