The Buffalo Butcher: Jack the Ripper in the Electric City

Has Jack the Ripper returned?

Summer 1901, and the great Pan-American Exposition welcomes the world to Buffalo, New York-Queen of the Lakes . . . the Electric City. Eight million visitors throng the bustling boomtown-all of them looking for a good time.

While the Pan-American blazes bright, in its shadow lies a zone of darker pleasures: the Tenderloin District, a rabbit's warren of saloons, brothels, and ask-no-questions hotels. In this sprawling vice quarter, fully as large as the Exposition itself, fairgoers can indulge their less innocent appetites.

As heat and swarming crowds choke the city, the bodies of prostitutes begin turning up, slashed and mutilated by a pitiless hand-their flesh carved with strange symbols. Their gruesome murders are a final indignity worked on once-hopeful young women.

Some say the killings are the work of the Devil himself. Others hint that the Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, has crossed the Atlantic to resume his bloody career. Yet the city's power brokers-afraid of any publicity that would harm the Exposition-turn a blind eye to the victims.

As the bloody summer wears on, only one thing is clear: it'll be up to the working girls themselves to stop the carnage. And in The Buffalo Butcher, five of them will stand together to confront the killer . . . and to reclaim their humanity.

An important new novel by Robert Brighton, acclaimed author of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency(TM) Mysteries.

Robert Brighton, award-winning author of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency(TM) Mysteries, is an authority on the turbulent final years of the Gilded Age, a vibrant, exciting era that is all too often misunderstood as stuffy and sexless. In his novels, Brighton peels away the glittering surface of the turn of the last century-a time both utterly strange and strangely familiar-to reveal the passions, conflicts, and human drama churning just beneath.When not writing novels, Brighton is an adventurer, having traveled to fifty-six countries around the world, and usually on only a few dollars a day. He is a relentless researcher who, before writing any of his historical novels, spent almost four years reading-cover to cover-four major newspapers from 1897-1904. Among his somewhat quixotic career choices, he has been a mule wrangler, a bison rancher, and a vintage automobile restorer.A graduate of the Sorbonne, Paris, Brighton is an admirer of Emily Dickinson and Jim Morrison. He is fond of tinkering with anything mechanical, splitting firewood, and observing the weather. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their two British Shorthair cats.