Oscar Wilde and the Return of Jack the Ripper

February 1, 2019
After a string of sleuthing successes, has the Dynamic Victorian Duo met its match in the most formidable criminal of the era? Silly question. Narrating in an appropriately plummy first person, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle relates his latest adventure with peerless wit Wilde (Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol, 2012, etc.), which begins when drunken Wilde, making no secret of the fact that his financial situation is dire, visits the author on the first day of 1894 to offer holiday wishes and entice him into another investigative romp. The pair hook up with Chief Constable Macnaghten of the Metropolitan Police, who's tracking a malefactor whose modus operandi unnervingly recalls that of the infamous Jack the Ripper. The discovery of a new victim five years after the initial spate of killings has raised fears of a return, and the fact that the murder occurred not in Whitechapel but in the more affluent Chelsea neighborhood raises additional questions. Wilde and Doyle's leisurely probe begins with a close study of the five verified Ripper murders from the previous decade. The duo's interrogation of suspects and witnesses does not preclude entertaining detours like a trip to the circus with Oscar's wife and two sons. They rub elbows with Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll. While they don't publicly expose the identity of the serial killer, they bear witness to another of his crimes, and Wilde makes a compelling case for his identity.Brandreth's seventh Wilde mystery feels like two books in one: a crisp account of the Ripper murders and a droll roman à clef about the last years of the singular Wilde. As with the author's earlier Wilde mysteries, the journey far overshadows the destination, and delightfully so.

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March 1, 2019
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plays Watson to Oscar Wilde's Sherlock Holmes in Brandreth's lively series, which uses the device of having Doyle write up their adventures years later. Doyle's perspective as a companion to Wilde?very different in values and habits, enchanted and baffled by Wilde?provides great insights into Wilde (and the friends' dialogue works in many of Wilde's epigrams). It makes sense that Brandreth would put the incisive Wilde and the more meticulous Dr. Doyle together as amateur detectives; each plays to the other's strengths. This, the seventh in the series, is set in 1894, six years since what police believed to be the last victim of Jack the Ripper was found. Then another woman is found savagely murdered in a way peculiar to the Ripper. Chief Constable Macnaghten (who actually lived on the same street as Wilde) asks Wilde to use his extensive contacts in the underworld to unearth suspects. Wilde and Doyle embark on the investigation, more killings follow (ever closer to Wilde's home), and a promising new theory of the Ripper's identity closes this involving history-mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)