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The Whitechapel Conspiracy (Magill Book Reviews)

The Whitechapel Conspiracy is Anne Perry’s twenty-first mystery in her Thomas Pitt series, and like its predecessors, it features the paraphernalia, manners, and language of late Victorian England.

The plot relies on complications that accrue from the murder of Martin Fetters, an antiquarian, by his friend John Adinett, an adventurer, both of whom support the republican ideals of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. At first Fetters’ death is regarded as a suicide, but Thomas Pitt, a police detective, proves it is murder, and so Adinett is found guilty and hung, without revealing his motive.

Adinett had belonged to an Inner Circle of upper class republicans, including Charles Voissey, an appeals court judge furious at not being able to reverse Adinett’s verdict. As for Pitt, he is banished by the Inner Circle from his police work in Bow Street to the East End, London’s most volatile slum, as an undercover agent for the Special Branch, which fears an uprising in the district. In their attempt to uncover why Adinett killed Fetters, and thereby rescue Pitt from disgrace, Pitt’s wife Charlotte, their housemaid Gracie Phipps, and Pitt’s former sergeant Samuel Tellman mount their own investigation.

While Pitt stays with a Jewish couple, does odd jobs for a silk weaver, and works as a nightwatchman in a sugar factory for his cover, Charlotte and Fetters’ wife Juno hunt for Fetters’ secret papers, and Tellman and Gracie, following Lyndon Remus, a journalist, about London, discover that the Ripper murders in Whitechapel were done to conceal the dead Duke of Clarence’s marriage to a woman named Annie Crook.

What this has to do with the Fetters’ case is made clear after Pitt finds James Sissons, the owner of the sugar factory, dead in his office. This too is a murder made to look like a suicide, and the note Pitt also finds at the scene blames the Prince of Wales for bankrupting Sissons. It is soon evident that this is a lie meant to close Sissons’ sugar factories, throw many of the local poor out of work, and cause an uprising.

Luckily, charlotte is the niece of Lady Vespacia Cumming-Gould, and in possession of Pitt’s evidence, as well as the incriminating papers she and Juno have finally unearthed, she impels her aunt to attempt to foil the conspiracy that threatens to pull down the monarchy and even Parliament.

Though it is tedious with too many formal visits and too many surveillance details, the look into late-nineteenth century English society The Whitechapel Conspiracy provides, and the plot threads it lays out and gradually weaves together, make it an absorbing novel.