Stalking Jack the Ripper

About the Stalking Jack the Ripper series

Audrey Rose Wadsworth has a secret her upper-crust Victorian London family would be scandalized by: she trains in secret as her uncle's forensic medicine apprentice, dissecting cadavers and studying crime scenes at a time when women weren't permitted anywhere near a lecture hall, let alone a morgue. When a series of gruesome murders begins terrorizing Whitechapel -- the real Jack the Ripper killings -- Audrey Rose is pulled into the investigation alongside her uncle's enigmatic, sharp-tongued assistant Thomas Cresswell, and the case turns out to be far more personal than either of them expects.

Kerri Maniscalco's breakout series pairs genuine forensic-science detail (period-accurate autopsy procedure, crime-scene analysis) with a slow-burn enemies-to-partners romance and a gothic, fog-and-gaslight Victorian London atmosphere. Audrey Rose is a determined, unapologetically ambitious heroine fighting her era's assumptions about what a woman can study and know, and Thomas's arrogant genius plays perfectly against her own. Across four books, the central Ripper mystery of the first novel opens into a wider quartet of period-set investigations, following the pair from Whitechapel to Bucharest, aboard a transatlantic ocean liner, and to a chilling final case tied to the killer who started it all.

For readers who want their historical mystery with real gore, real romantic tension, and a heroine who refuses to stay in her assigned lane, this is one of the genre's most popular modern entries.