Alone on the pier, Jennifer leaned over the railing and dropped the tin straight down, well away from the pilings with their tangled fishing lines. It hit the water with a splash, bobbed on the waves, and drifted away into the dark. Perhaps it would be carried out to sea, or perhaps, like Marilyn Diaz, it would be caught in a riptide and returned shoreward. She would let time and chance decide.
She hoped, though, that it would be lost in the ocean’s distant depths. Not every case had to be solved, as Draper said. Let Jack the Ripper remain a mystery. Let him be remembered not as what he was, not as Edward Hare with his motherless childhood and his lurid dreams of blood, but as what the world wanted him to be—a tall man in a top hat and black cloak, striding down an alley, retreating forever into the fog.
About the Author
Michael Prescott is the New York Times bestselling author of nine previous thrillers, including the trilogy of Abby Sinclair–Tess McCallum books published under the titles Dangerous Games, Mortal Faults, and Final Sins. He has also published six titles under the pen name Brian Harper. His Web site is www.michaelprescott.net .
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Diana Ross for her excellent proof-reading, Margaret Falk for her advice and encouragement, and Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich for their indefatigable efforts to find the book a commercial publisher. It’s not their fault that the fiction end of the book business is in sorry shape these days. Like many other authors, I found it necessary to self-publish, an approach that is likely to become even more common in coming years.
As always, I invite readers to visit my Web site at www.michaelprescott.net .
Riptide required more research than any of my other books. Some of my principal sources are listed in the collection of Ripper books purchased by Jennifer in Chapter 10.
Other valuable sources of information on the Whitechapel Fiend were the Casebook website, www.casebook.org (archived contents available on DVD); John Douglass and Mark Olshaker, The Cases that Haunt Us; Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer; and Ivor Edwards, Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals.
Details on the Carrie Brown case were found in R. Michael Gordon, The American Murders of Jack the Ripper; Michael Conlon’s and Wolf Vanderlinden’s articles and message-board posts at casebook.org; and Wolf Vanderlinden, “The New York Affair, Part III,” in Ripper Notes: America Looks at Jack the Ripper, July 2004 (sold through Amazon.com).
General historical background was supplied by D.J. Leighton, Montague Druitt: Portrait of a Contender; Martin A. Danahay & Alex Chisholm (eds), Jekyll & Hyde Dramatized; Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City; Dan Kurzman, Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906; George Garrigues’s website Los Angeles in the 1900s (apparently no longer online); the Los Angeles Chinatown Business Council, www.chinatownla.com ; and the Westland Network Web site on history of Venice, www.westland.net/venice/history.htm .
For psycholinguistics, I consulted two books by Andrew G. Hodges, Who Will Speak for JonBenet? and The Deeper Intelligence, as well as Katharine Ramsland, “Literary Forensics,” www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/literary/1.html .
One book that came to my attention as I was doing the final revisions on Riptide was The Secret of Prisoner 1167, by the late James Tully. In a carefully researched presentation, Tully argues that an escaped homicidal maniac named James Kelly was the Ripper. Whether or not this is true, it’s interesting to note that Kelly left England after the killings and traveled extensively in the United States, venturing as far west as Los Angeles.
Perhaps the saga of Edward Hare is not quite as far-fetched as I’d assumed...
COPYRIGHT PAGE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
RIPTIDE
Copyright © 2010 by Douglas Borton.
Cover design by Michael Prescott.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 978-1-4536-4048-7
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