Frontispiece by Rigby Graham, dust jacket after a painting by John Bellany. First edition. 8vo., original black cloth, dust jacket. Beautifully designed by Martino Mardersteig and printed, old-fashioned letterpress, in Verona.

A novel bringing together an impressively predatory and seedy group of antiquarian book-dealers and an investigation of the 19th-century Jack the Ripper murders. The London East End and bare East Anglian locations generate a bizarre and realistic atmosphere for the rush of events - dark Dickensian alleys and occult churches, hospitals of victims and crazed doctors, panicking aristocrats in their backstreet sexual encounters, and the isolation of grim marshlands and ruined boats. The double detective plot fuses a hunt for rare books with an obsessive plunge into the Ripper labyrinths opened up by the Sickert family and others. Past and present ferment in an atmosphere of hallucinatory and actual fears in an extending underground.