In all his years on the force, DCI Pendragon has never seen a murder quite like this one.

It isn’t the bizarre arrangement of the body found in a London art gallery that has Pendragon and his team reeling, it’s the meticulous arrangement of an apple in the hole where the corpse’s face used to be. The reference to surrealist painter Magritte is horrifyingly clear.

Twenty-four hours later, the police have a second grotesque killing on their hands. This time, the crime scene emulates a famous Dali painting, The Persistence of Memory. Someone is turning murder into an art form…

And it’s not for the first time. More than a century earlier, the citizens of Whitechapel in London’s East End lived in fear of another artist with a knife. Though Jack the Ripper was never caught, his teaching lives on.

Now, in the twenty-first century, Jack has a gifted and bloodthirsty apprentice…