A Deadly Deception
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
The streets of Victorian London are clothed in shadows and secrets in Tessa Harris’s gripping new mystery featuring flower seller Constance Piper …
London, July 1889. Eight months have passed since the horrific murder of Mary Jane Kelly. The residents of Whitechapel have begun breathing easy again—daring to leave windows open and walk about at twilight. But when old Alice McKenzie is found dead, throat slashed from ear to ear, the whispers begin once more: Jack the Ripper is back.
Constance Piper, a flower seller with a psychic gift, was a friend to both women. With the supernatural help of her late mentor, Miss Emily Tindall, and her more grounded ally, police detective Thaddeus Hawkins, she uncovers links between the murders and a Fenian gang. The Fenians, committed to violence to further their goal of an independent Ireland, are also implicated in a vicious attack in which the Countess of Kildane’s uncle was killed. Could the Whitechapel murders be a ruse to make the British police look helpless?
Soon, Constance is called upon for help. But there are spies everywhere in the city, and a bomb plot intended to incur devastating carnage. And as Constance is fast discovering, the greatest evil may not lurk in the grimy alleys of the East End, but in a conspiracy that runs from Whitechapel to the highest office in the land …
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eight months after Jack the Ripper's last killing in 1888, Alice Mackenzie is found dead of wounds similar but not identical to those of his victims, in Harris's muddled third mystery featuring flower seller Constance Piper (after 2018's The Angel Makers). London police detective Thaddeus Hawkins investigates the possibility that at least one supposed Ripper murder, that of Mary Jane Kelly, is the work of Irish nationalists. Constance, who was friends with both Mackenzie and Kelly, discovers that each of them had Irish connections and that Kelly had foreknowledge of her peril. The more Hawkins and Constance learn, the more certain they become that they're facing not a single deranged killer but a conspiracy that encompasses the country's elite. Heavily reliant on events that occur before the book opens, the plot requires copious backstory and a glut of secondary characters. Harris unfortunately focuses on overcomplicated logistics, giving some of the series' most appealing elements including the dynamics between Constance and Hawkins short shrift. This is a lesser entry in the large field of Ripper-related mysteries.
