In Review: Stalking Jack the Ripper
I wanted to read Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco since I first discovered Booktube. The OG place where books got their hype before TikTok was a thing. Something about it always appealed to me, but the more time passed, the less likely I was to pick it up. I was scared the book would feel too young or just too cliche. Fiction changes a lot in a short time. A book published a decade ago is very different from one similar to the one published now. So, I thought my opportunity to enjoy this book was in the past. Thankfully, I was so incredibly wrong.
Title: Stalking Jack the Ripper Author: Kerri Maniscalco Series: Stalking Jack the Ripper #1 Publication year: 2016 Length: 9 hours 26 minutes Genre: YA, Murder Mystery, Historical Fiction Pace: Medium Story focus: Character & Plot
Audrey Wadsworth has a life of wealth and privilege. Daughter of a lord, she didn’t have many challenges in life. Although as much as her family and society want her to, she doesn’t fit in tea dates and dress shopping. Her true passion lies in her uncle’s laboratory: forensic medicine. Against her father’s wishes, Audrey is studying the human body and surrounding herself with dead bodies. When multiple gruesome murders shake London, Audrey is determined to follow through with her investigation despite all the dangers. Although the killer might be closer to her than she thinks.
Like any crime mystery girly, serial killers and real murders interest me in some way. Although, I don’t watch true crime entertainment. Occasionally, I can watch a Netflix documentary, but I don’t get too invested. Real life is often pretty boring, and I don’t want to get lost in theories and what-ifs, when it comes to reality. Usually, I google it, get the facts and get out. And if I want to be entertained, I go to fiction.
I barely know anything about Jack the Ripper other than what the general public knows. Victorian era, killed prostitutes, and was never found. I wasn’t expecting this book to educate me on the case or to even be a plausible solution to a more than a century old mystery. In this book, I expected Jack the Ripper to set a time period and a modus operandi for the crimes. But this book is much more than that.
Maniscalco explains, in an author’s note, her research on the real victims and how she decided to bring them to this novel. How she wanted to show the human side instead of the horrific crime scenes they were a part of. And you feel that through Audrey. This girl is fearless around dead bodies. She has assisted her uncle in multiple autopsies, and yet when she sees these women, she has a hard time maintaining her posture. She can’t stop thinking these women are wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. They don’t deserve to end like this, despite their life choices. This is also what motivates Audrey to search for the killer herself. Since they were prostitutes, it seems people aren’t as bothered about their deaths as Audrey feels.
Audrey’s rebel spirit sets her on a dangerous path to find the killer. Luckily, our romantic interest is never too far away to save her. Thomas is one of her uncle’s students, who he took as an apprentice. From the start, there’s a rivalry between them as to which one is the better student and the rightful apprentice to her uncle. Thomas also patronises her since he sees her as just a woman who shouldn’t be there. Over time, that turns into fun banter and a very unladylike relationship between the two.
While the mystery is a big part of the story, it’s not the whole focus. There’s the romance and Audrey’s relationship with her family. Her mother is dead, and so it’s only her father and brother living together. But her father is still having a hard time dealing with the death of his wife and becomes overprotective of Audrey. This creates a lot of problems and restraints for her. And it doesn’t help when her aunt comes in to push her to do more lady-suited activities and leave the dead bodies to her uncle.
As a main character, Audrey is everything I like to read. She’s determined and acts upon injustice even if she’s alone. Being from the Victorian era means she also goes against society’s standards. And that fierceness that comes from not conforming to the norm is a must in a YA protagonist, for me. I have no idea if this book is historically accurate. If Audrey could exist in this time period. But I’m willing to sacrifice that for a protagonist I enjoy following.
I had no idea how the mystery would conclude. The cast of characters is very limited, so any character to be revealed as the killer would be a bittersweet moment. And it had a rezoning far more complicated than I was expecting. This wasn’t just an unstable man or a man hating women kind of story, like I’m guessing the real Jack the Ripper was. There was all this story behind the murders that turned out to be far worse than the murders themselves. The romance does bring some lightheartedness to an otherwise dark tale.
Overall, it was an entertaining journey to Victorian London to follow a determined young woman thriving in a world of men against society’s standards. The romance was fun and entertaining, and the murders were gruesome and dark. Like really dark. I could never imagine the dark turn the story was taking. And it was so much more captivating than I was expecting. I wanted to read this book for so long, and I’m glad I finally did it.
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