In 1988, in the back alleys of West Berlin, a city sealed off from the free world by the Wall, five street prostitutes are murdered in a savage spree: throats cut, abdomens opened, organs torn out. As investigators search for a pattern, they find an impossible one. The victims, the wounds, even the timing mirror almost detail for detail the crimes of Jack the Ripper in London’s East End exactly one hundred years earlier. Has history’s most infamous killer returned?

With the investigation stalled, Berlin descends into Ripper hysteria. Suspicion falls on Ren Holzer, a nihilistic young punk with a violent hatred of prostitutes, while Monika von Felten, the young vice-squad officer who found the first victim and barely survived the killer’s attack, struggles to recover. Then an eccentric Englishman in a red frock coat and top hat appears at police headquarters. Calling himself “Clean Mystery,” a figure readers of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders will find strikingly reminiscent of Kiyoshi Mitarai, he makes an audacious claim: solve the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and the identity of the Berlin killer will follow.

Moving between Victorian London and a divided Berlin that no longer exists, Soji Shimada reconstructs the canonical Ripper case with meticulous historical detail and offers a startling solution to the world’s most famous unsolved crime. Now reissued in a revised definitive edition, this is a dark, ingenious mystery about poverty, violence and the solitude that can bind two lives a century apart.