From My TBR Pile: Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

GASLIT LONDON IS BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES IN DAVID MORRELL'S BRILLIANT HISTORICAL THRILLER.

Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years earlier.

The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives.

In Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history. Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

First sentence:

London, 1854

Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyke, it is said, always practiced their art in full dress.

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Mulholland Books; First Edition edition (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316216798
ISBN-13: 978-0316216791