Hand Yelling Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

I've been reading David Morrell for years. Amazed most I think by how masterful every book is. How intelligent but at the same time fast paces. How smart he is but how he never makes you stop to notice it. And how he keeps reinventing himself as an author - taking on every kind of suspense novel  - and doing it as well as anyone ever has. 

Now he's taken on historical suspense and you will swear that he must have used a time travel machine to write Murder As a Fine Art. You will be in gaslit London... you will smell the filth.. you will walk the dark streets... you will be scared and horrified and your heart will beat faster and you will know when you are finished with this astonishing novel that you have truly been in the hands of one of our era's most brilliant masters of the genre.

I don't review books - but I do hand yell (my version of a booksellers "hand sell"). If you love historical suspense - you will be enthralled! Truly! (All the buy links are here)

Publishers Weekly calls Murder as a Fine Art a “brilliant crime thriller. . . . Everything works–the horrifying depiction of the murders, the asides explaining the impact of train travel on English society, nail-biting action sequences–making this book an epitome of the intelligent page-turner.”

Chosen as one of PW’s 10 Best Summer Mystery/Thrillers of 2013!

Here's the flap copy:

The Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 were the most notorious mass killings in their day. Never fully explained, they brought London and all of England to the verge of panic.

Forty-three years later, the equally notorious Thomas De Quincey returns to London. Along with his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he is infamous for a scandalous essay about the killings: “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

Days after his arrival, a family is killed in the same horrific way as the earlier murders. It seems someone is using the essay as an inspiration—and a blueprint. And De Quincey himself is the obvious suspect. Aided by his brilliant daughter Emily and two determined Scotland Yard detectives, he must uncover the truth before more blood is shed and London itself becomes the next victim.

In Murder as a Fine Art, gaslit London becomes a battleground between a literary star and a demented murderer. Their lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.