Stalking Jack the Ripper

Kerri Maniscalco’s debut Gothic mystery novel Stalking Jack the Ripper is the first in her popular murder mystery series for young adults. Inspired by the true events of 1888, the novel traces a 17-year-old protagonist’s search for a notorious serial killer in London’s East End. As a work of historical fiction, the novel takes some liberties with factual material. The text also includes historic images and photos to add to its sense of authenticity. Stalking Jack the Ripper is a New York Times bestseller and now has three sequels. This guide uses the 2016 Little, Brown Books for Young Readers edition.

Content Warning: This guide refers to violence against women and gore, which are depicted in the novel.

Plot Summary

The novel is divided into 30 chapters, which are narrated in the first-person past tense by the protagonist, Audrey Wadsworth. Audrey is a 17-year-old girl from an aristocratic family in London. Her father is the esteemed Lord Edmund Wadsworth, and her brother is the roguish but kind Nathaniel Wadsworth. Above all, Audrey loves forensic science, in particular, spending time in her Uncle Jonathan Wadsworth’s basement laboratory, where she assists him in performing autopsies on cadavers. She also is sometimes permitted to sneak into his lectures on forensic science. Her father strongly disapproves of this; she has to sneak out or make up excuses to get to her uncle’s lab.

One day, Audrey and one of her uncle’s young students, Thomas Cresswell, assist Uncle Jonathan in an autopsy. The body is from a murder victim, Mary Ann Nichols, and Uncle Jonathan is assisting Scotland Yard in the investigation. They note the surgical precision of her wounds and wonder whether the murderer has medical training. Audrey is disconcerted to learn that the murdered woman used to be employed in Audrey’s family’s home.

Not long after this, another murder is committed. This time, the victim is Annie Chapman—a young woman who worked as a sex worker in London’s East End. While Audrey is looking through her father’s desk for details on Miss Nichols’s employment in their home, she comes across an article detailing Miss Chapman’s murder and becomes disconcerted. Back in Uncle Jonathan’s lab, Audrey and Thomas find a diary entry on the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith that happened months ago and seems to fit the model of the recent killings of East End sex workers.

Audrey is determined to find out her family’s connection to the murders, and so she and Thomas travel to Reading to meet with Audrey’s family’s former valet, Aldous Thornley. When they arrive, Thornley is old and gravely ill. Amidst his cryptic ramblings, he mentions someone named Alistair but dies before he can give more details. The man turns out to be Alistair Dunlop, Audrey’s family’s former carriage driver. They find Alistair’s body at the London docks; he was killed just before they arrived—presumably by the murderer.

Because Uncle Jonathan is so involved in the investigation and has taken items from the murder scene, he is arrested on suspicion of being the murderer. He is held at Bethlem Royal Hospital, known as Bedlam, a notorious psychiatric institution. Audrey is distressed to see his condition when she visits him there, and later she discovers that his porridge was being laced with opiates. While Uncle Jonathan is at Bedlam, two other women are murdered. The news conflicts Audrey: she is upset that more women have been brutally killed, but she is glad that her uncle is no longer a suspect. Meanwhile, Superintendent Blackburn, who is in charge of the investigations, has begun courting Audrey, and Audrey and Thomas have become more flirtatious with one another. A new element enters the investigation when Jack the Ripper sends a letter to Scotland Yard boasting of his crimes and threatening to cut off the ear of his next victim.

Superintendent Blackburn asks Audrey to consult on the two current murders, but Audrey’s father discovers this and takes her home, reprimanding Blackburn for letting her take part in the investigation. Later, Audrey’s father reveals that Blackburn is the suitor he picked for Audrey (not Thomas, as she had supposed). He forbids her from going to her uncle’s laboratory and threatens to throw her out of the house if she disobeys him again.

After Uncle Jonathan is released, Audrey joins him in his lab, flaunting her father’s restrictions. The lab has been wrecked in the police search, and they try to repair the damage. Audrey learns that one of the murder victims, Miss Smith, was her uncle’s former fiancée. Later, she learns from Nathaniel that Thomas’s mother died of gallbladder disease. This makes Audrey wonder about Thomas’s connection to the murders, as she saw him taking out a gallbladder at her uncle’s lab, and a gallbladder was missing from one of the murder victims.

Audrey goes to the funeral of one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, and there, she and Thomas meet Robert James Lees, a spiritualist and medium who offers to conduct a séance to ask his spirit guides for help on the case. At the séance, he tells Audrey that she knows the killer and says that the Ripper is coming for her next. Terrified, he urges Audrey to leave London.

Instead of leaving London, Audrey decides to investigate further. By now, her father’s erratic behavior has made her suspicious that he is the killer. She and Thomas dress in common clothing (Audrey uses a dress belonging to Miss Smith that she found at her uncle’s house) and travel to the East End at night. A man who accosts Thomas with a knife turns out to be the angry family member of someone whose body was given to Thomas for use in research; Thomas and Uncle Jonathan only conduct medical research on bodies from cemeteries that families have not claimed. However, in this case, a mistake was made. After the incident, Audrey and Thomas kiss passionately. Soon, they see Audrey’s father leave a derelict lodging with a woman who appears drunk. Audrey’s father gets into his carriage and departs while the woman walks in the other direction. Then, Audrey and Thomas follow her father home. The next day, the same woman is found dead. Thomas thinks Audrey’s father is innocent, but she disagrees; she thinks he must have snuck out again to commit the murder after they followed him home and resolves to confront him.

As Audrey, Thomas, and Uncle Jonathan examine the mutilated murder victim, they notice her heart is missing. This is not unexpected as Uncle Jonathan had predicted that the killer would take the heart of his next victim. When Audrey goes home, she looks for her father but cannot find him. While rubbing a smudge of dirt off of a portrait that hangs on the wall, Audrey accidentally opens the secret door and stumbles upon a terrifying laboratory hidden in her own home. The lab contains rotting organs, medical equipment, and the partially decomposed body of her mother, who died five years earlier. A heart being pumped by electricity sits in a metal cage. Audrey is sure she has found evidence that her father is the murderer, but her brother, Nathaniel, arrives and admits that he is Jack the Ripper. He was murdering women to harvest body parts in an attempt to resurrect their mother. Now that he has the heart, he needs Audrey’s blood to pump through the body. He ties Audrey to a chair while he draws her blood. At that moment, Audrey’s father arrives and orders Nathaniel to untie her. Thomas also arrives; he was worried about Audrey’s safety. Nathaniel decides to complete his experiment but accidentally electrocutes himself and dies when he sends a volt of electricity through the corpse.

After seeing how instrumental Audrey has been in solving the murder cases, her father finally accepts her love of science and arranges for her to study at the Academy of Forensic Medicine and Science in Romania. She will be accompanied by Thomas, who jokes that they will soon be engaged.