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by Sarah Pinborough
A virtuoso fantasy writer, Sarah Pinborough has won numerous awards including the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. In Mayhem Pinborough turns her attention to one of the most baffling and notorious crime sprees in Victorian times. A new killer that newspapers have dubbed "The Torso Killer" is terrorizing the streets of London's East End, his crimes obscured and overshadowed by the hysteria surrounding Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel crimes.
The victims are women too, but their dismembered bodies, wrapped in rags and tied up with string, are pulled out of the Thames–and the heads are missing. The murderer likes to keep them. Mayhem is a masterwork of narrative suspense: a supernatural thriller set in a shadowy, gaslit London, where killers stalk the cobbled streets and hide in plain sight.
"Starred Review. In this chilling exploration of madness and evil, Pinborough excels at summoning up the bleak spirit of Victorian London's mean streets and those forced to fight for survival there." - Publishers Weekly
"Mayhem is a beautifully rendered exploration of madness in all its forms. The author takes sleight of hand to new heights. She makes the mean streets of Victorian London all too real. It's a demanding, moody horror story with a shocking twist." - Irma Heldman, Open Letters Monthly
"A compulsively readable story that starts as a conventional murder mystery and morphs, by degrees, into a horrifying supernatural thriller." - The Guardian (UK)
This information about Mayhem was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Pinborough was once a teacher, but now writes full-time. She is developing an original horror screenplay, Cracked, and her supernatural crime series, The Dog-Faced Gods, for TV. She lives in West London.
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