Mayhem (2013) by Sara Pinborough

Mayhem (2013) by Sarah Pinborough: Several of the characters in Mayhem were real 1880's Victorians, chief among them primary vocalizer (seriously) Dr. Thomas Bond, who worked for Scotland Yard in the 1880's and 1890's. Unlike most crime novels set in Victorian London circa 1888-89, Mayhem does not focus on Jack the Ripper. 

Instead, Mayhem sends Bond and two others on a quest to discover the identity of a real, never-identified murderer who operated contemporaneously with the Ripper -- The Thames Torso Murderer. He or she got that name for dropping disassembled bodies into the Thames, the heads never to be found. The killer's most brazen act was dumping one body at the construction site of New Scotland Yard!

Sarah Pinborough does a nice job evoking the squalor and sorrow of the poor sections of London, setting them against the more refined social circles in which Bond moves in his civilian life. His work on the Ripper murders has already caused Bond to seek out opium as a relief as the novel opens. Things are going to get worse. Much worse. The Ripper is only a symptom of something in London -- the Thames Torso murderer is the cause. As skeptical as Bond may be of the supernatural, he will nonetheless have to face it before the novel ends.

Mayhem is sympathetic not only to Bond but to the female murder victims of the killer, some of whom receive chapters devoted, third-person, to their plight and to their fears and hopes. Pinborough also turns one of the unlikeliest suspects in the Ripper murders into a sympathetic, haunted figure essential to find the Torso killer. In all, a solid novel of crime and the macabre. Recommended.