Sarah Pinborough - Mayhem

[dem bones]

Sarah Pinborough - Mayhem (Jo Fletcher Books, 2014: originally 2013)

Cover design & illustration by Ghost

Blurb:
1888.

In the smoggy backstreets of a dangerous London, Jack the Ripper is at work.

But his shadow is long, and in the deeper darkness another killer watches – one with a more sinister origin.

Dr Thomas Bond is the man assigned to investigate the case and as he becomes ever more embroiled in London's seedy opium dens, he starts to wonder: is it a man that has brought mayhem to the streets of London, or a monster?

While the Ripper is slicing London's working girls, a Thames Torso murderer is merrily littering the river and the vault beneath the New Scotland Yard premises with trunks and sundry body parts. He/ she keeps the heads. Are he/ she and the Whitechapel butcher the same entity? Where will it all end?

The Police having little to go on, turn to Westminster surgeon and master of forensics Dr. Thomas Bond, praying his superb brain can penetrate the ghoulish mystery. But is Bond, a chronic insomniac and slave to opium, someone to put faith in? And what's with the seemingly omnipresent guy with the withered hand? How comes he sticks with that long, heavy black waxen coat even in the middle of a heatwave?

Ninety pages in and we've already dropped by on Leather Apron and Aaron Kosminski at home, both clearly unhinged, but then, this is Whitechapel, so they are hardly alone in that department. Not least the bastard who just did for young Ava the Polish factory worker. Even the attention-seeking Ripper feels compelled to berate the press, outraged that he should be mentioned in the same breath as a low-life targeting decent girls.

TBC

[dem bones]

"Abberline's got orders to question anyone who appeared at all suspicious during the house-to-house last month."
"Suspicious? In Whitechapel?" snorted Moore. "We'll be here till hell freezes over."

Up until now it's been a straight, engrossing Jack the Ripper novel, but that changes when Bond finally catches up with his quarry in a Bluegate Fields hovel. The man with the withered arm is a Jesuit priest sent by Rome to hunt down and destroy the torso murderer which - unlike Jack - is not of mankind. The Upir "brings madness and wickedness in its wake, spreading it like this choking fog across the city." The priest is not what you'd call a bundle of laughs.

The Upir is an ever-present in poor, reeking Aaron Kosminski's nightmares. Kosminski, a hairdresser fallen on hard times because his hands shake so and he smells like a sewer, knows the monster is loose in the city and tells as much to the police. They laugh him out of the building. Aaron's dread of water is such that he never bathes. His all-round strange behaviour leads to his being suspected of the Ripper murders. Dr. Bond knows otherwise. He, the priest and Aaron enter into unlikely alliance.

James Harrington is another fellow with good reason to fear water. He's not been the same young man since his visit to the Polish countryside in the summer of 1886 where he drank from a stream and fell ill with what at first appeared to be consumption but is in fact far deadlier. Those who get too close to him do not survive for long, and then there was that terrible business with the streetwalker in Paris, torn to pieces so that a monster could get at her yummy organs. "What if ... the villagers were right? What if something did come out of the river and attach itself to me?
What if I am now the Upir?"

This is very bad news for young Elizabeth Jackson, a Chelsea prostitute turned housekeeper who is pregnant with James' baby ....

Just 100 pages of nastiness to go ...

[dem bones]

There was something peering up from his back, and it was dark and awful and evil.
And to think she had been afraid of Jack the Ripper.

All done now, and, have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Mayhem - even the ending is proper. Dr. Bond, the nameless priest - who takes his self-flagellation to extremes - and Aaron Kosminski make for the unlikeliest trio of phantom fighters this side of DI Chandler, DS Miles and Ed Buchan in Whitechapel, but they get the job done, albeit at huge cost to their own health and sanity, while there is also much regrettable "collateral damage" along the way. The Upir, who spends the bulk of the novel in the shadows, is a true demon star, an absolutely fiendish creation bent on malevolence for its own sake. And it's table manners - all that slurping .....

The good news is, a second Dr. Bond & friends adventure is already available.

Sarah Pinborough - Murder (Jo Fletcher, May 2014)

Blurb:
Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, is still recovering from the events of the previous year when Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London — and a more malign enemy hid in his shadow.
Bond and the others who worked on the gruesome case are still stalked by its legacies, both psychological and tangible.
But now the bodies of children are being pulled from the Thames ... and Bond is about to become inextricably linked with an uncanny, undying enemy.