Readers are transported to Victorian London and introduced to Inspector Doyle, a modern-day detective with eternal life, who discovers that he has been wrongly named as ‘Jack the Ripper’, the Victorian serial killer. Nobody wants that label at any time in history, so with the aid of time travel he returns to the year 1888 in an attempt to clear his name.
Another complication for Inspector Doyle is that his modern-day daughter, Flora, who he has left behind to travel back several centuries, is becoming increasingly suspicious of her father’s identity. This is after making her way into his Shrewsbury study, that she is forbidden to enter.
The only good thing about returning to 1888 is that Inspector Doyle is able to rekindle his relationship with daughter Alice and wife Eleanor, who he had to leave behind all those centuries ago. Alice can then only but marvel at her father’s abilities to answer a question that only he knows the answer to, because he has travelled into the future and back.
The story references many Victorian objects that have been meticulously researched and then used to tell a story that is only possible through time travel and a rather clever inventor who may or may not be still alive. Many elements of the original Jack the Ripper case are also detailed as are the horrors of Whitechapel.
Find out whether Inspector Doyle manages to clear his name by discovering who the real Jack the Ripper is, and expect a twist at the end that involves both daughters and a Victorian book that, unlike the rest of Inspector Doyle’s objects, is unable to exist in parallel between the two time zones.
