Pay no attention to the top hat on the cover of this YA paranormal mystery; it looks Victorian, but the action takes place in the present day. And you’d think, if a Jack the Ripper copycat killer were going to strike in present-day London, he’d have no chance of escaping the CCTV cameras surveying the streets from every angle.
But he does.
Rory Deveaux, fresh from Louisiana, is a little starry-eyed to be spending a year abroad at Wexford, a London boarding school. Jammy Dodgers! The Tube! (“Welsh is an actual, currently used language…. It sounds like Wizard.”) But when murder victims are found near campus, marking the anniversaries of the Whitechapel killings in 1888, English history starts hitting a little too close to home.
What’s more, Rory thinks she’s seen the killer—but her roommate, who was standing right next to her, didn’t see a thing. Whatever it means, her newfound ability to see the un-seen makes her really valuable to the police investigation, and especially to its ghost-hunting unit, the Shades of London (also known as Scotland Graveyard). Unfortunately, it makes her an asset to the killer, too. And the anniversary of the last Ripper killing is only a few days away…
A more serious, suspenseful read than Johnson’s screwball Suite Scarlett series, this adventure has ghosts, historic true crime, and confrontations in unused stations of the London Underground. It’s the first of a planned series, the Shades of London.
Check the WRL catalog for The Name of the Star.
