The Women in the Shadows

Harriet Fox

THEY were murders that horrified London’s Victorian society and spread terror among the women who lived in the streets of the city’s Whitechapel district. The five victims of the infamous serial  killer, nicknamed Jack the Ripper, were all prostitutes, stabbed and mutilated in attacks that were so brutal that even hardened police officers were shocked by their savagery.

The man labelled a monster was never identified or arrested and today the murder sites are the focus of a macabre tourist industry and countless wild theories about the Ripper’s identity. But who were these women, what do we know of their lives… and could their murders have been solved if a much cannier detective team had been on the case?

The hunt for answers to such a notorious unsolved crime takes on a whole new complexion in The Women in the Shadows, a gripping novel that cleverly blends fact, fiction and feminist revenge, from Harriet Fox (pictured below), an author and journalist who also writes under the name Kerry Barrett and has a passion for stories that free women of the past from the shadows of history.

In Fox’s gripping reimagining of the Ripper hunt, we meet three feisty and fearless heroines, all different ages and from different walks of life, and all determined to use their insider knowledge, finely honed women’s intuition and personal detection skills to take on the shortcomings of the police and succeed where the men are failing.

It’s London in 1888 and a monster is prowling the gas-lit streets of Whitechapel, women are being horribly murdered and butchered by a frenzied killer, and the police, led by conscientious Inspector Fred Abberline, would appear to be looking in all the wrong places and at all the wrong suspects. But there are three women who refuse to stay silent and reckon they could make a far better and faster job of hunting down the man who is soon dubbed Jack the Ripper. Bet Palmer, a cleaner at Whitechapel police station, knows all too well that being a young woman in a station full of men means she is, to all intents and purposes, invisible and can overhears what others ignore. When Bet is offered a job to double as cleaner at the nearby home of Insp Abberline and his sharp-witted wife Emma, she takes up the post and brings with her invaluable insider knowledge of some of the victims and their local haunts.

Emma, who is still mourning the death of her only child some years earlier and whose opinion and ideas have always been valued by her policeman husband, can also see that the investigation is going nowhere. Meanwhile, Maggie Cameron, a middle-aged private investigator who specialises in gathering evidence for divorce cases, is adept at exposing men’s darkest secrets and is eager to prove her detective skills. Together, they form an alliance to hunt down the savage killer but as the three women weave through the slums, brothels, and smoke-filled parlours of the East End’s underworld, they uncover corruption more sinister than they ever imagined. The city might belong to men… but that is changing.

Fox’s fact-based flight of imagination makes for a revealing, entertaining and often heartbreaking journey into a long-ago but not forgotten crime and puts a new spin on not just the perpetrator but his victims, exploring the sobering effect the horrific murders had on the other women who shared those dangerous streets, and adding a welcome ray of light to a dark slice of disturbing real history.

And what a compelling window it is into the desperate race to find the serial killer, with a charismatic cast that includes fictional players and portraits of the real people… the Ripper’s victims, the redoubtable Fred Abbeline, a respected police inspector known for his extensive knowledge of East End crime, and builder George Lusk, the caring man who was chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee during the murders and worked hard to keep the streets safe.

But it is the sense of a powerful desire to seek out female justice coursing through the pages that speaks loudest as though reassuring readers that the search for the killer is now in the more empathetic and sympathetic hands of a team of women who will to leave no clues undiscovered, and no neglected corners unnoticed, to track down the Ripper. Add on the streets of Victorian Whitechapel rendered viscerally real, the community spirit and bonds of female friendship galvanised by the continual fear of another attack, and a twist in the tail which offers a fascinating, fictional new dimension to a true story, and you have history, mystery and imagination in thrilling harmony.
(HQ, hardback, £16.99)