Stalking Jack the Ripper

Stalking Jack the Ripper is a novel by the American writer Kerri Maniscalco, published in 2016 by Little, Brown. It is the first of the series about a young woman investigating crimes in the nineteenth century.

The book is set in London at the time of the Whitechapel murders, when the press named the killer Jack the Ripper and the police failed to catch him. Its narrator is a young woman from a respectable family whose interests lie elsewhere: she wants to learn the medical and forensic work that the men around her practise, at a moment when a woman of her class is expected to marry and leave the subject alone. What she has, and what the professionals do not, is an ability to move through the city's society as well as through its mortuaries, and she uses both to build a picture of the killer while the bodies accumulate. The investigation brings her into conflict with the people who are supposed to protect her, and it puts the cases of the period together with the details of her own family's life.

The novel began a sequence that takes the same narrator to other crimes and other cities of the late nineteenth century, and it is written for young adult readers.