A journalist draws out the grim story of the accomplice to "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" in The Butcher's Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett, a gritty Victorian thriller by David Demchuk (Red X; The Bone Mother) and debut author Corinne Leigh Clark.
Journalist Miss Emily Gibson is missing. Among her effects, the constables find a series of letters exchanged with a woman whom Miss Gibson believed may have been Mrs. Margery Lovett, hiding out in a convent instead of long since dead in Newgate Prison, as is widely thought.The woman and everyone else at the convent deny it, but as Miss Gibson pursues the truth, her correspondent reveals the events of her life. It's an account of poverty, oppression, and the macabre, graduating from the mundane violence of the butcher shop of her childhood to the doctor's house where she went into service after her father's untimely death.
Demchuk and Clark spin a hair-raising tale, marching readers toward the inevitable climax of Mrs. Lovett's narrative while also maintaining suspense about the fate of the missing journalist. It's clear that nothing good happened, but by whose hand and why? Musical aficionados should be aware that The Butcher's Daughter is set in the world of penny dreadfuls, not Stephen Sondheim, but it reaches beyond into a fully fleshed out portrait of Victorian slums. And if readers are reminded of other gory 19th-century legends, they may be on to something. Demchuk and Clark will keep them on the edge of their seats. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library