I didn’t know what to expect from this debut novel, but it turned out to be quite a surprise. Susannah Chapman, a plain woman with limited options, has spent years caring for her ill grandmother. After her grandmother passes away, Susannah, at 27, moves to London to become a nurse. There, she meets the charming Dr. Thomas Lancaster, who, despite being younger, quickly wins her over. They marry, but things change abruptly after the honeymoon as Thomas becomes distant and irritable. Susannah grows suspicious when his overnight absences align with reports of murders in Whitechapel.

This novel reimagines the Jack the Ripper murders from a woman’s perspective and vividly captures the grim realities of life for women in Victorian London. The writing is engaging, with strong characters and immersive, sometimes unsettling, descriptions. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to fans of historical fiction, even those who don’t often read the genre!

This was brilliant. There are definitely some triggers in this for things like gaslighting. But this was extremely well done. As a Historical Thriller this has the amazingly gritty feel of historic London, and shows how things would have been handled. Not just forensics but also hospital procedures and proprietary of women and relationships. The ownership of women, weather this is by a husband or by a bargain.

Characters start to show a lot of their colours at about the 80% mark, and I mean ALL characters. It also starts to get really graphic in bodily harm, so I would be aware of this when getting to the end, and the secrets that are relinquished are really quite impressive.

The main character, Susannah, is a strange character but you can see where she comes from. When she is trying to better her situation, she marries a doctor at the hospital she is working at. This is one of those books that just keeps surprising. Her character itself is a surprise.

You hate Thomas, the main male character, and also Miss Wiggs. But a lot of the relationships are obvious. I did like that there were some LGBTQ+ references but that they were needed.

Honestly this is fantastic and really sets the scene. I will be reading more of Clare Whitfield's work.

A fantastic debut novel
The pace started off slowly but it did pick up
The characters were written very well.
I loved the twists towards the end of the book
A really enjoyable book

*DNF*

Copy kindly received via NetGalley for an honest review.

This book sounds really good, but I find myself constantly being distracted and putting it down. It seems very slow, and I just can't bring myself to want to keep reading. I've seen good reviews so I'm sure others will push through or find no issue, it's just not for me right now.

A slow start but enough going on to keep me interested.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

3.5 rounded up.

I was drawn to the concept of this novel. I'm torn about the continued obsession with Jack the Ripper - are we glorifying a monster? There is no doubt that the case is fascinating, that it gripped the east end, and that even those not living in the poverty-stricken area were, it seems, worried and sympathetic. This isn't a given for that time period. In fact, I'm sure there were many who weren't bothered as the victims of the murders were not high class.

Years ago I visited London in my early 20s and did a Jack the Ripper tour. Now that I live in London I've had pints at The Ten Bells and could walk the streets of the crime scenes as Chapman does in the novel. I have enjoyed recent nonfiction that turns the tables and focuses on uncovering details of the lives of the victims and restoring some dignity to them.

The idea that you could be living with a murderer is frightening enough that we follow Chapman's wild thoughts and don't think them totally outlandish. A lot of the puzzle pieces fit.

I thought I'd really love this and there were things that I did enjoy, but I'm not sure I I quite believed the voice of our narrator. I am also not entirely sure what we're really meant to think of her. A lot of her actions are understandable but I had reservations about her as a character still. I wished these was even more bite to her, and I'd suspected more skeletons in her closet than those ultimately revealed.

The pacing was also slightly off for me.
I think there was a bit too much packed into this, and would have liked slightly more details.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Love, love love this fantastic book set in a Victorian London under the shadow of Jack the Ripper. The author writes from the angle of a young, newly-wed woman was starting to work as a nurse when she met her husband to be, a well-respected doctor at the hospital. He’s a wealthy man and has a lovely home, but here and there I started to feel uneasy for the wife, Susannah. My main misgivings were about the housekeeper, who has worked with Susannah’s husband for a number of years and seems to be rather territorial. There is an established routine at the house and far from settling in and changing things to suit her, Susannah is being told how things will be done. As other reviewers have mentioned there were hints of Rebecca here and the terrifying Mrs Danvers. Susannah becomes aware that there is a man killing women around the Whitechapel area and there is a tangible sense of fear for all women in the community. However, after unexplained absences and a detachment on her new husband’s part, Susannah starts to have doubts. Her husband has surgical skill and he’s absent at strange times of the day and night. All of this could be explained by a busy and attentive doctor, but it would also be easy to use his respectable persona as a cover. What if her new husband is Jack the Ripper.

Her setting is well described and I could see the squalor and poverty of the Whitechapel area. This background gave us a social context to the Ripper’s crimes and it helped to bring the women he killed to life. The author doesn’t lose sight of the victims in this case and the fact that this is a real story, not a tourist attraction. Most of the book is narrated by Susannah in the first person, but she gives us short fragments in the third person about each woman he killed, taking us on a journey through the last hours of their lives. I think these could have been longer to make more of an impact, but they do help us understand the women’s circumstances and the social injustice that drove them to taking such risks with their lives to make money. I’ve heard people wonder why women still worked the streets even with a killer stalking the area, but the answer is they simply had no other choice. The author reminds us that while her book is thrilling and enjoyable, these women had identities, lives and people who loved them. They were not just victims.

This was an interesting angle on the Ripper case and thats hard to do when there’s such a saturated market around his crimes. I raced through the book and I’m really looking forward to reading her next novel which is already on my TBR.

This was a a difficult read for me. While I loved the premise and was looking forward to reading, it didn't fully deliver on my expectations. Very slow to start it did pick up toward the end.

As much as I love curling up with a book on a cold, grey day, I much prefer reading outdoors on a spring like afternoon such as we’ve had lately. Of course, my favorite reading venue is a sunny, breezy beach with salt in my hair and sand under my feet.
Great summer reads are those that keep you up late or miss mealtimes because you want to read “just one more chapter.” My routine was disturbed by a couple of titles recently.
Clare Whitfield’s “People of Abandoned Character,” due out May 1, opens in 1885 with Susannah at her grandmother’s funeral. An orphan, she is now completely alone in the world. Terrified that she will end up as destitute as her mother was, she returns to the filthy slum of Whitechapel where she was born, to train as a nurse at the London Hospital.
Susannah resigns herself to the modest but secure life of a nurse until she meets the handsome Dr. Thomas Lancaster. Unsure why he is so in love with such a plain woman as herself, she agrees to marry him after numerous proposals.
Soon after they return from their honeymoon in Brighton, Thomas changes. He becomes angry and abusive, and he disappears on several nights to return home first with scratches and later covered in blood.
At the same time, Susannah is reading about the horrific murders and mutilations of women in Whitechapel. Many of the murders happen on the same nights that her husband disappears.
Susannah is determined to find out if her husband is the Jack the Ripper. She ends up finding out much more.
In addition to being a thrilling page-turner, Whitfield’s book explores several questions: what makes a person good or bad? Can we overcome our origins? Or is our fate determined before we’re born? Moreover, the book is rife with dangerous secrets—Thomas’s, Susannah’s, and those of the people closest to them.

The crime I didn't even know I needed.

I adored this spin on the Jack the Ripper tale - Clare Whitfield has a wonderful imagination and I can't wait to read what she writes next!

London, 1888: Susannah rushes into marriage to a young and wealthy surgeon. After a passionate honeymoon, she returns home with her new husband wrapped around her little finger. But then everything changes…

What would you do if you thought your husband was Jack The Ripper? I loved the intrigue that this book provided based around this question, it is what drew me into it. As the story continued and we started to learn more about Susannah and her husband Thomas and his late night meanderings that coincidentally line up to a night where someone is murdered by Mr Ripper, we come to see just how scary life in those times can be.
I did feel like the story lacked some conviction in places and felt like there could have been more to it, I think we needed more of Thomas and his plights to really understand his character but as this was from Susannah’s point of view, it was fitting that all we had was her nervous and uncertainty when it came to her husband.
The last few chapters of the book were full of action and things happening that should have had more time spent on them to come to the conclusion, as it felt a little rushed after the slower pacing of the first half of the book.
Overall however, it was an enjoyable read and a slightly different take on what we know about Jack The Ripper.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really was looking forward to reading this after seeing the blurb - the Jack the Ripper and creepy gothic element really appealed to me.

That being said, I found it very hard to get through the first half of the book! It was slow to begin with and the characters weren’t developed enough for me to be invested completely in them.

The second half was better, but I had already reached a level of boredom with the story after the slow beginning. The gory descriptions weren’t gratuitous but very relevant to the plot and I thought the idea behind the story was a good one, I enjoyed the female perspective, but it needed to get moving a lot earlier on.

I really wanted to love this but it just wasn't it for me. The writing was fine but the way the story progressed was just a bit silly in places. I thought it was going to be interesting but it was just dissapointing.

It's Jack the Ripper meets Rebecca as a newlywed is subjected to emotional abuse, gas lighting and psychological mind games by her estranged aristocratic husband and his housekeeper.

This would make a great Hallmark movie. It has the creepy, unsettling and the dangerous atmosphere you would expect from a Ripper novel but also the over-the-top soap-opera melodramatic shenanigans and insane Hallmark plot twists that make you go "wha?!? what did I just watch". It is more of a Victorian murder-mystery than a the Gothic Ripper story die-hard fans would enjoy, but still a fine romp through Victorian London

Recommended for fans of Kate Morton, Things in Jars, The Crow Garden, The Animals at Lockwood Manor, The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross, Philippa Gregory

Thank you to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for the ARC.

This was a really interesting read and a unique perspective on the Jack the Ripper story.

Susannah is a nurse in Victorian London, when she marries a wealthy surgeon she thinks her life is made. However, as soon as they set up home her husbands temperament changes, he becomes short tempered and violent. At the same time women are being killed at an alarming rate and morbid curiosity in the murders is running high. With her husbands movements becoming increasingly suspect, Susannah begins to wonder if her the man known as Jack the Ripper could be the man she married.

Jack the Ripper is a figure that has captured many imaginations, mainly because the truth is not clear. Whitfield’s version of event seems like it could well be true, certainly the situation Susannah finds herself in with her husbands violence feels all too real, even in the modern day. Susannah is a fine example of a strong woman with a backstory that highlights this, it is sad to follow her struggles with the constraints of being a woman during this time. The development of her character is so well written.

I do feel other characters could have been explored in more depth, but it was perhaps necessary to maintain the air of mystery to keep the focus largely on Susannah. The writing is descriptive and pulls you right in to Victorian London. It’s a little slow to start but soon pulls you in for the second half with great setup for the final reveals. Whitfield doesn’t shy away from the gory elements of the story either and the stakes always feel high.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book had all the potential to be a book that I could fall in love with, but for the first 70% I’m sad to say I was bored!

I began to lack sympathy for Susannah and was desperate for her to fight back to her husband or to try and discover wether he truly was the Ripper or not. She suspected it very early on, but did nothing about it other than lock herself in her room? I suspected that there would be some amateur sleuthing involved, but this took what felt like a very long time to get to.

In the beginning, I also expected more from the Jack the Ripper side to this book as there didn’t seem to be much behind the inclusion of these historical events, so I was soon trying to understand the point of it.

It was also a bit of a typical plot in regard to the household once Susannah was wed.
New wife enters a house where the house keeper and the husband dislike and seem to abuse her.
A husband who turns out to be gay, and who eventually tries to pass his wife off as ‘sick’.
Hasn’t this been done before so many times already? I wasn’t shocked to discover any of this and I wasn’t thrilled about it either.

HOWEVER, the last 30% definitely lifted my opinion of this book. The discoveries of Thomas’s parentage, what Susannah did to her grandmother, and the truth about Dr Shivershev was all a VERY nice surprise.
The way the author entwined true facts of the Ripper with fictional characters was also very clever, and my earlier opinion about the lack of Jack the Ripper events was soon changed.
I also ended this book with admiration for Susannah’s survival, even though throughout this book she irked me a little.

It seems that ‘the good stuff’ was left until the last minute in this book! I only wish there was more of this is the first three quarters of the book!
The ending definitely saved this book from ruin! So I give it 3 stars because of the lack luster start, but the ending was fantastic.

London, 1888: Susannah rushes into marriage to a young and wealthy surgeon. After a passionate honeymoon, she returns home with her new husband wrapped around her little finger. But then everything changes. Thomas's behaviour becomes increasingly volatile and violent. He stays out all night, returning home bloodied and full of secrets. The gentle caresses she enjoyed on her wedding night are now just a honeyed memory. When the first woman is murdered in Whitechapel, Susannah's interest is piqued. But as she follows the reports of the ongoing hunt for the killer, her mind takes her down the darkest path imaginable. Every time Thomas stays out late, another victim is found dead.

This is an absolute gem of a book. Clare Whitfield manages to create a novel that blends fact with fiction beautifully. With themes of poverty, science, the Ripper and feminism all worked into this highly readable novel. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Wow I picked this debut novel up with no expectations and was blown away. The atmosphere, the characters, the details on the era were all fantastic.

London, 1888: Susannah rushes into marriage to a young and wealthy surgeon. When they return from honeymoon, she has her husband wrapped around her little finger. But Thomas's behaviour becomes increasingly volatile and violent. He stays out all night, returning home bloodied and full of secrets. I enjoyed how it was told from Susannah perspective and we saw her change from a confident woman to a vulnerable mess.

Highly recommend.

A tense and unsettling novel set in 1888, the event in People of Abandoned Character interweave with those of the serial killer Jack the Ripper. Susannah believes she has finally succeeded in life in London after marrying a young doctor. It has pulled her from the depths of a black depression she fell into following a personal tragedy.

However, the lie of a life she is living comes crashing down as she realises her husband really isn't all he seems to be and she is now trapped with someone whom she suspects to be the biggest monster in London.

This book is extremely well written but it is not for the faint of heart. Although the most gruesome aspects really don't surface until later in the book, the treatment of Susannah is just as horrifying to read, although unfortunately not an uncommon phenomenon even in today's society.

I found Susannah to be a little bit pathetic to start with but reminded myself the situation of a woman of her age would be in in 1888. The housekeeper was truly terrifying spectre and probably more malevolent than Thomas, Susannah's young husband who was cruel and childish.

These were just the main characters in a whole cast that were brilliantly written with a great depth, including the brief appearances of Jack's victims. An excellent historical fiction thriller.

Well, this doesn’t go as you expect it to! If you know anything at all about Jack the Ripper or not, it’s a gripping foray into a world that is thankfully long past us; of horrific poverty, a vicious class system and morals governed by money, not ethics. As Jack prowls the streets of Whitechapel, Susannah finds herself in an increasingly dark place. As the story progresses, she seems in an impossible position, yet there’s a twist to this tale that will surprise and delight. Nobody, but nobody, is who they seem...