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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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