Stalking Jack the Ripper

About the Stalking Jack the Ripper series

Audrey Rose Wadsworth has a secret her upper-crust Victorian London family would be scandalized by: she trains in secret as her uncle's forensic medicine apprentice, dissecting cadavers and studying crime scenes at a time when women weren't permitted anywhere near a lecture hall, let alone a morgue. When a series of gruesome murders begins terrorizing Whitechapel -- the real Jack the Ripper killings -- Audrey Rose is pulled into the investigation alongside her uncle's enigmatic, sharp-tongued assistant Thomas Cresswell, and the case turns out to be far more personal than either of them expects.

Kerri Maniscalco's breakout series pairs genuine forensic-science detail (period-accurate autopsy procedure, crime-scene analysis) with a slow-burn enemies-to-partners romance and a gothic, fog-and-gaslight Victorian London atmosphere. Audrey Rose is a determined, unapologetically ambitious heroine fighting her era's assumptions about what a woman can study and know, and Thomas's arrogant genius plays perfectly against her own. Across four books, the central Ripper mystery of the first novel opens into a wider quartet of period-set investigations, following the pair from Whitechapel to Bucharest, aboard a transatlantic ocean liner, and to a chilling final case tied to the killer who started it all.

For readers who want their historical mystery with real gore, real romantic tension, and a heroine who refuses to stay in her assigned lane, this is one of the genre's most popular modern entries.

How to read this series

Read the quartet in publication order: Stalking Jack the Ripper, Hunting Prince Dracula, Escaping From Houdini, Capturing the Devil. It's one continuous story following Audrey Rose and Thomas's relationship and a series of connected investigations, and later books spoil earlier ones, so publication order is the only sensible way in.

No companion novellas or side reading exist for this quartet. Kerri Maniscalco's later Kingdom of the Wicked trilogy is a separate, unrelated fantasy-romance series with a different setting and cast.