Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, and his widow gives Bosch a murder book, one Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD twenty years before-the unsolved killing of a troubled young man. Bosch takes the murder book to Detective Renée Ballard and asks her...

"Framed around one salacious trial in 1891 London, a fascinating and vividly told true-crime narrative about the hunt for one of the first known serial killers, whose poisoning spree in the US, Canada, and England coincided with the birth of forensic science as well as the public's growing appetite for crime fiction such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels" --