White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

In this unusual novel, Iain Sinclair draws a powerful portrait of London’s criminal character by mingling secrets of the modern city with menacing personas from its Victorian age. A clan of profiteering book dealers becomes obsessed with the 1888 Ripper murders in the Whitechapel district of the East End. In exploring these crimes, they — and the reader — step into the dark streets of Victorian London. There they maneuver through the chaos of the cholera epidemic, the ghastly operations of Victorian surgeons, and of course the gruesome murders of one of history’s most notorious killers.