As a child Abigail Sharp was encouraged to be independent and free-thinking by her governess mother. It was anything but a conventional childhood and, as a result, Abbie is anything but a conventional Victorian young lady. Unfortunately, since Lady Charlotte Westfield took in her newly orphaned grand-daughter, that is exactly what Abbie has to pretend to be.
It isn’t easy.
After her latest escapade sees Abbie chasing a pickpocket through the insalubrious streets of London, she is sentenced to charity work at family friend Dr Bartlett’s Whitechapel Hospital. Perhaps it was intended as an object lesson about what happened to independent young girls with no visible means of support, since most of Bartlett’s patients are prostitutes and the poor. For Abbie, however, it was a chink of light in an increasingly stultifying life.
Except it is 1888, the year Jack the Ripper stalked the prostitutes of Whitechapel, and Abbie is having horrifying visions of the murders. Caught up in the Ripper’s web of violence and secrets, Abbie must discover the truth behind their connection before anymore people die. With the help of Dr William Siddal and Simon St John, Abbie uncovers an ancient plot and a heart-breaking connection to her past.
Author Amy Carol Reeves’ is a scholar of 19th century British Literature and has been published in a number of academic publications. Ripper, however, is the first dip of her toe into the Young Adult genre. It shows a little bit.
Reeves is a good writer, if sometimes a little detached, and is obviously passionate and knowledgeable about the period she is writing about. Her narrative skills are exceptional, and she deftly weaves disparate threads of conspiracy, co-incidence and just plain old make-believe into a convincingly tapestry of events.
Abbie is an easy heroine to like and the required romantic sub-plot is fairly deft handled, with both love-interests written with a nice mix of charm and conflict, and never eclipses the main plot. Even the gimlet-eyed and repressive grandmother is nicely developed, with a careful thread of care under her worry about status and respectability.
However, the book is something of a historical gumbo, with a few too many co-incidences and twists thrown in for flavour. It just ends up being a bit top-heavy, weighted down with coincidental back-stories and surprise connections.
Most of those connections were quite good – I actually didn’t know that the poetic Rosettis had a connection to vampire canon and wish I had used that first – but there were just so many of them. It ended up feeling layered on rather than deft and clever.
On the whole this was an enjoyable first effort from Reeves, with a solid plot and a nice, steady build up of tension. The villains were self-righteously repugnant and the insidious Max was a complex, frightening character. Occasionally it just all felt a little neat – no character just met another, there were always multiple threads that tied them into events – but it was still a ripping yarn and a fun read.
