Murder as a Fine Art

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.
"AT FIRST GLANCE, it seems odd that mid-Victorian England, known for its tightly controlled emotions, became obsessed with a new type of fiction called the novel of sensation. When Wilkie Collins published The Woman in White in 1860, he set off what Victorian critics called a Sensation Mania that satisfied the “cravings of a diseased appetite,” “a virus... spreading in all directions.” This shocking new fiction had its roots in Gothic novels of the previous century, with the difference that sensation novelists set their stories not in ancient, brooding castles but instead in the very real homes and neighborhoods of Victorian England. Darkness didn’t come from the supernatural. Rather, it festered in the hearts of supposedly respectable public figures whose private lives hid dismaying secrets. Insanity, incest, rape, blackmail, infanticide, arson, drug abuse, poison, sadomasochism, and necrophilia these were some of what sensation novelists insisted were concealed behind the Victorian veneer of decorum and reserve."