In all his years on the force, Detective Chief Inspector\nPendragon had never seen a corpse like this one. After the initial\nhorror, he recognised the reference to the surrealist painter,\nMagritte. But that made the crime even more sickening –\naccomplished, as it had been, with a sickening ferocity which\nplaced it in another league from common or garden homicide.In the\nWhitechapel area of London in the 1880s, a person, who remains\nunidentified to this day, committed a series of sadistic murders of\nlocal prostitutes, which involved elaborate mutilation of the\nvictims’ bodies.Although the contemporary crimes are not directed\nexclusively at female targets, there is grotesque similarity in the\nmindset of the two perpetrators – divided, as they are, by more\nthan a century. But Pendragon is determined that his pathologically\nbrilliant killer will not escape detection.THE ART OF MURDER\nreveals Michael White’s mastery of a crime genre that he is making\nuniquely his own.

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