Review
  The Secret of Prisoner 1167-Was This Man Jack The Ripper?  by James Tully
Robinson Publishing   £16.99
A new theory about the identity of  the "Ripper"  will no doubt prove irresistible to the many for whom this unsolved murder still holds a particular fascination.
James Tully has spent nine years, pursuing his own lines of investigation. He has enlisted the help of numerous people connected with the relevant legal, penal and medical institutions and has, it seems, gained access to certain police files which, until now, have been kept secret.
The result is a very detailed and thorough examination of what is known of the life and character of a man called James Kelly, who murdered his wife, was imprisoned in Broadmoor, escaped, and was on the loose at the time of the vicious "Ripper" murders in the East End of London.
It is also an account of incompetence and apathy on the part of the police at the time and of a successful cover-up which is only now, claims the author, being exposed.
Six chapters of the book are given over to accounts of the lives of the women who were victims of the horrendous crimes and to  full descriptions of each murder.
It is always questionable, in revelations of the exact nature of true crimes,  just how much detail  needs to be laid bare.  By focusing at length on the lives of the murdered women who lived in the slums of the East End  James Tully is, he states,  "giving them the dignity they deserve."  Details of their hard lives, surviving only by prostitution, will perhaps evoke sympathy for the women who before were merely names and victims. And details of the nature of the murders in the order that they occurred , including the development and progression  of the mutilations inflicted does, apparently, it is claimed, throw light on the  psychology of the perpetrator.
The book is structured in a straightforward and logical way.  The painstakingly acquired evidence, given in great detail, is  convincing, as are hypotheses concerning the factors which can lead to the kind of police cover-up which the author suggests.  Tully’s arguments for his theory of the identity of the real "Jack the Ripper" are persuasive.  The book is an interesting development in the long running mystery of the infamous killer.
PED

  Review
The Drowning Mark by Alan Scholefield
  Macmillan £16.99
An atmospheric mystery/thriller, the setting is the Suffolk coast with mention of real villages
in the area and a quite famous little restaurant where oysters are the speciality.
Ex copper Mike Harley has had to retire from the force and a high powered job in Scotland Yard due to an injury to his knee, sustained while rescuing Doctor Alexandra Kennedy from a dangerous  situation late at night on a run down housing estate.  They are now together in a fairly serious relationship and as the story opens we learn that Mike has acquired a boat as his new home,  that it is moored  among the marshland and small creeks near the estuary of the Lexton River and that half of the town of Lexton has in the past fallen victim to the crumbling coast and now lies submerged under the sea.  Mike’s  plan for his future way of  making a living involves diving for salvage from wrecks and such buried  places of human habitat as the old town of Lexton.
The opening paragraphs are guaranteed to get the reader hooked , with a description of the place where the boat is moored  which conveys the eerie and mysterious nature of the setting, and a palpable sense of unease and dread as a dead body floats gently on the tide away from the fog bank offshore and towards the river estuary and the boat. As the couple onboard wake to sunshine through the porthole there is a scraping noise along the side of the craft and, up on deck to investigate, they see the dead body among the reeds.
The discovery of the corpse initiates a series of events and enquiries which bring out the full force of the antagonism of several of the leading lights of the village towards the couple and eventually lay bare  long buried secrets which threaten the peace and composure of some of them.  There is  friction between Mike and Alex  over their course of action and plenty of suspense as they both pursue their own lines of enquiry.
This  is  a first rate story, told with skill and panache - another winner for Alan Scholefield.
PED.

 Review
A Monstrous Regiment of  Women by Laurie R King
Collins Crime £15.99
Sacrilege! Holmes romantically involved with a chit of a girl - and an American to boot.
Sacrilege it may be, but it is precisely this unconventionality that makes the combination of Mary Russell, who has newly gained majority (and with it immense fortune), and the Great Detective, so readable.
There is a spikiness in their exchanges that is hugely entertaining and one is left in no doubt that Russell, as Holmes addresses her, would never stand for her mentor’s patronising in the way that poor, befuddled Watson did for so many years.
If the American voice abrades the delicate inner ear of the English reader, it is an occasional fault only.  The breath taking daring of the intrepid Ms Russell is sometimes hard to accept, we need only remind ourselves that this tale relates to a heroic time before post traumatic stress disorder was given any real credence, although there is an appreciation in the story of the horrors suffered by the poor devils who returned from the Great War much diminished.
There are, in fact, modern themes aplenty in A Monstrous Regiment of  Women  - Mary herself is a newly fledged Oxford academic, researching the "blatant mistranslations and deliberate obliteration" of the maternal side of God in the Bible: "God the mother, hidden for centuries."  We are given drug addiction and smuggling, a religious cult and women’s rights, all in rapid succession.  The emphasis is perhaps rather on action rather than detection, but, far from harming the narrative, this made me want to read on (and on, despite other pressing responsibilities), desperate to uncover the real villain, and, God help me, to discover if Holmes could ever reciprocate the affections of  King’s feisty and eminently likeable heroine, a puzzle which, for me, was a deeply compelling feature of this story.
Margaret Murphy

Review
   She Must Have Known by Brian Masters
Corgi Pbk - £6.99
25 Cromwell Street has superceded 10 Rillington Place as Number One Charnel House in the annals of crime. The decaying slum house in Rillington Place was the scene of the murder and disposal of six women and its occupant, John Reginald Halliday Christie, the centre of one of the most notable miscarriages of justice in British legal history. His tenant, Timothy Evans, was hanged for the murder of his child  ( and the unspoken conviction that he had also killed his wife). When it was subsequently discovered that more bodies were buried in the garden, beneath the floorboards and in hidden cupboards in the house, Christie was arrested and confessed to the murder of Mrs. Evans. Then doubts began to be raised concerning the safety of the prosecution of Timothy Evans for the murder of the baby. However, by then it was too late - Evans was dead and the Police fought long and hard to defendthe jury's decision. It was not until sixteen years later that Timothy Evans was granted a free pardon.
Instrumental in maintaining the pressure on the authorities was the powerful indictment of the original Police investigation and succeeding trials in the book 10 Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy. And now Brian Masters has produced an analysis of the West case that not only allows an investigation into the mind of a serial killer, but also advances a well constructed defence of Rosemary West's part in the affair. This is not an easy  task:- even by the end of the book Rosemary West is a deeply unattractive figure. But should her sordid adventures, mostly initiated by her husband, condemn her? She would not be the first woman to be convicted on moral rather than evidential grounds.
Masters makes out a convincing case that, in their desperation to get a guilty verdict once the actual killer had committed suicide, the authorities bent rules of evidence and allowed flagrant breaches of laws governing the buying of witnesses stories by the press. That the evidence against Rosemary West was circumstantial is not criticised by Masters - circumstantial evidence can be more compelling than dubious eye witness testimony - but the "similar fact" evidence allowed by the judge was tenuous at best, argues the author in a powerful demolition of the court case. What the prosecution's case boils down to was the apparently impressive, but actually dubious argument, that "she must have known".
The author's interest clearly lies in the motivation and actions of the murderer Fred West - not surprisingly since he has written a number of books on other killers (studies to which he repeatedly refers throughout this book) - but his campaigning for Rosemary West lends the book a dignity which it might otherwise lack. Who knows it may one day attain the stature of 10 Rillington Place in righting a judicial wrong.
JRC

 Review
  Nocturne by Ed McBain
Hodder £16.99
  Or, more properly, this review is of "Nocturne" by ED MCBAIN, the author's name being three times the size of his product on the dust jacket of this novel. McBain has been a prolific writer for over forty years and few with an interest in crime fiction will not have read at least one of his stories and acknowledge his right to have his name way above the title. It is with profound shame I now confess I have never read a McBain novel, although I remember tearing up cinema seats when "Rock Around The Clock" intoduced the opening credits of "The Blackboard Jungle".
"Nocturne" is a novel of the 87th Precinct and concerns two intertwining murder investigations by the morning shift - the graveyard shift - over the course of a few freezing nights in January. One is a classic whodunnit and concerns the search for the killer of Svetlana Helder, ex-concert pianist fallen on arthritic times, whilst the second follows the sordid events leading to, and subsequent investigation of, the murder of young prostitute Yolande Marie Marx.
During the course of the action McBain's characters swap pointless remarks, relate jokes the point of which are missed and reflect on misnamed films. Great stuff. He even makes sideswipes at Quentin Tarantino, the irony being that McBain's dialogue and situations could have come straight from a Tarantino movie. Or, more probably, vice versa. And the jokes are good: "This old guy is in a nursing home, the doctor comes in his room, he says ' I've got some bad news for you'. The old guy says 'What is it?' The doctor says ' First, you've got cancer and second, you've got Alzheimer's'. The old guy goes 'Phew, thank God I don't have cancer' ".
So now I have to read some more McBain - it's good stuff and I'm not the sort to tell lies (except about ripping the seats at the flicks during the opening titles to "The Blackboard Jungle")
JRC.

Review
Kat Scratch Fever by Karen Kijewski
Headline £17.99
In this latest in the series of Kat Colorado mysteries, (previously we have had titles such as Katwalf, Katapult, Wild Kat and so on) Kat struggles to bring a malicious blackmailer to justice. 
Someone has something on a lot of people in Kat's hometown of Sacramento - several of the people involved being her friends and acquaintances. In return for large payments to a children's charity, the blackmailer is offering his/her silence on various misdemenors, all of a somewhat sleazy nature - former prostitution, incest, teenage pregnancy and so on.
The charity involved, "Hope for Kids" seems to be the key to both the crime and the mind of the criminal. Why should anyone go to all the trouble blackmail involves, not for their own gain but for the welfare of disadvantaged children, and does that make it any less of a crime? Kat thinks not. She knows she is dealing with an unbalanced personality, but the trouble is that she seems to know a hell of a lot of people who fit that description.
The book is full of minor characters and sub-sub-plots which all work and would be interesting in themselves but are slightly too much when added together. Kat's relationships are many and rather too varied. Her steady boyfriend seems stuck in to add respectability and emotional stability to her life, but we aren' t told enough about him to care whether she dumps him or not. Her family and friends are all eccentric and/or have secret pasts - I tended to lose track of who had done what. But, the action is fast-paced and the dialogue witty. Kat's sardonic sense of humour certainly grows on you. As an added bonus there are interesting descriptions of Sacramento where Karen Kijewski lives and where I just happen to be visiting next month. I enjoyed the book for that alone, but I'm sure you will too, even if you're going no further than your back garden this summer.
AC