IN THE SHADOW OF GOTHAM

A detective and several criminologists track a madman from the Palisades to the Bowery in a debut set in 1905.

After the tragic loss of his fiancée, Detective Simon Ziele heads north from New York City for the village calm of Dobson. That calm is suddenly shattered by a vicious murder in one of the town’s stateliest homes. A young woman, Sarah Wingate, is butchered; a maid and likely witness, Stella Gibson, is missing. But within hours, Ziele has a surprising lead. Columbia criminologist Prof. Alistair Sinclair is studying a psychopath whose macabre fantasies exactly match the details of the crime. With his daughter-in-law Isabella and the rest of his research team, Alistair has been trying to rehabilitate Michael Fromley, but he’s escaped. Ziele joins them to hunt for Fromley and follows other leads as well. Gradually they piece together the details of Sarah’s life. She was a suffragette and a brilliant mathematician on the verge of solving the famed Riemann Hypothesis with the help of Prof. Angus MacDonald, her mentor and secret love. Other graduate students resented her success, but none seems capable of this brutality. Fromley stays two steps ahead of the team, taunting them and meting out more violence until his body washes up in the Hudson, proving that he died before Sarah Wingate—and that Ziele, Alistair and Isabelle are tracking a killer even more calculating and vicious than they imagined.

In a setting rich with period detail, the Gothic horror spirals to a satisfying conclusion.