After reading ’13 Minutes’ on a friend’s recommendation and enjoying it so much, I wanted to try other books by Pinborough. It’s at moments like this that I’m tremendously grateful for public libraries!
What has impressed me with Pinborough’s writing so far has been the versatility she demonstrates. Common to the novels I’ve read so far is great characterisation, and this is no exception.
It’s very unlikely that you won’t know something of Jack the Ripper and his awful crimes. This is, indeed, part of the focus of ‘Mayhem’, but it is so much more than that. At the same time as the police were being taunted by the infamous Ripper, there was another murderer on the loose. Dubbed the Thames Torso Murderer, his modus operandi was to butcher the victims’ bodies and leave parcels of dismembered limbs for the police to discover. However, the heads were never discovered.
While this lesser-known story would have been interesting in itself, Pinborough adds in a fascinating supernatural element.
Initially I found the shifting viewpoints a little hard to follow, but as it becomes clearer how the characters link this became less of an issue. The main character of Dr Thomas Bond was intriguing. Initially sceptical of the potential for something ‘other’, I found his story absorbing. Following him around the opium dens of London, and getting caught up with some rather unusual characters, it was never totally clear how much of what he described was real, and how much was the imaginings of a mind overweight with tiredness and increasingly addicted to opium. As events draw to their thrilling conclusion I found myself trying to read more slowly to draw the experience out a little longer.
I can’t wait to see how Pinborough carries this story on in ‘Murder’.