The Lover
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction.
It is the autumn of 1940, and London is in the terrifying grip of the Blitz. An unidentified female corpse is discovered in an alleyway in Soho - the fourth to the have been found in a matter of weeks. The women - all prostitutes - have been horribly mutilated.
Rene is a Soho prostitute with a young son to support. She's learnt to cope with the air-raids, but each night on the streets is a terrifying ordeal as the killer begins to pick off her friends. Lucy is a young, middle-class office worker living with her family in Clapham, her head full of romantic notions of how love ought to be. She struggles to make sense of things as her peaceful suburban life degenerates into chaos while London burns and crumples under aerial bombardment. Jim is a fighter pilot, handsome and much admired for his heroism in battle. The killer instinct makes him perfectly suited to the daily challenge he faces above the skies of southern England, but the strain is beginning to tell.
In ordinary circumstances, their paths might never have crossed, but in war-torn London, anything can happen, and one night a bomb falls, with terrifying consequences for them all...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's period thriller offers a compelling setup inspired by the true, if little-known, rampage of the Blackout Ripper, who slaughtered prostitutes during the London Blitz of 1940. After two drunks and an air-raid warden stumble across the corpse of a woman carved up with a can-opener, the book flashes back to the events of the preceding five weeks from the perspectives of RAF Flying Officer Jim Rushton, hooker Rene Tate, and Lucy Armitage, who rides out the German bombings with her family in Clapham. While Wilson (A Little Death) reveals the identity of the homicidal sadist early on and rarely refers to the official police investigation, she easily maintains suspense, even as she peels back the layers of the murderer's twisted psyche. Some readers may regret the lack of a coda spelling out where the author parted from the historical record and whether the real-life killer was ever identified.
