The Ripper's Wife

A spellbinding novel of the Whitechapel murders and history's most notorious serial killer from the author of The Secrets of Lizzie Borden.

I was the first or, perhaps, the final, victim. Maybe I was neither. Maybe I was both . . . Maybe I destroyed myself . . . My name is Florence Elizabeth Chandler Maybrick . . . I was Jack the Ripper's wife . . .

It begins as a fairytale romance—a shipboard meeting in 1880 between vivacious eighteen-year-old Southern belle Florence Chandler and handsome English cotton broker James Maybrick. Courtship and a lavish wedding soon follow, and the couple settles into an affluent Liverpool suburb.

From the first, their marriage is doomed by lies. Florie, hardly the heiress her scheming mother portrayed, is treated as an outsider by fashionable English society. James's secrets are infinitely darker: he has a mistress, an addiction to arsenic and strychnine, and a vicious temper. But Florie has no inkling of her husband's depravity until she discovers his diary—and in it, a litany of his bloody deeds . . .

Drawn from the found journals of the alleged Jack the Ripper, and the twisted marriage of the real-life Maybricks, Brandy Purdy delivers a tantalizing and "compulsively readable" spin on the shocking Ripper crimes, and the desperation of a woman who, herself, was driven to murder (Historical Novel Society).