THE ART OF MURDER

In all his years on the force, Detective Chief Inspector Pendragon hadnever seen a corpse like this one. After the initial horror, he recognisedthe reference to the surrealist painter, Magritte. But that made the crimeeven more sickening - accomplished, as it had been, with a sickeningferocity which placed it in another league from common or garden homicide.In the Whitechapel area of London in the 1880s, a person, who remainsunidentified to this day, committed a series of sadistic murders of localprostitutes, which involved elaborate mutilation of the victims' bodies.Although the contemporary crimes are not directed exclusively at femaletargets, there is grotesque similarity in the mindset of the twoperpetrators - divided, as they are, by more than a century. But Pendragonis determined that his pathologically brilliant killer will not escapedetection.THE ART OF MURDER reveals Michael White's mastery of a crime genre that heis making uniquely his own.