Blitz: The Buffalo Butcher: Jack the Ripper in the Electric City by Robert Brighton with an excerpt and a giveaway

The Buffalo Butcher: Jack the Ripper in the Electric City

by Robert Brighton

Release date: October 8th, 2023

Genres: Adult, Historical

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199574558-the-buffalo-butcher

Blurb:

Has Jack the Ripper returned?

Summer 1901, and the great Pan-American Exposition welcomes the world to Buffalo, New York—Queen of the Lakes . . . the Electric City. Eight million visitors throng the bustling boomtown—all of them looking for a good time.

While the Pan-American blazes bright, in its shadow lies a zone of darker pleasures: the Tenderloin District, a rabbit’s warren of saloons, brothels, and ask-no-questions hotels. In this sprawling vice quarter, fully as large as the Exposition itself, fairgoers can indulge their less innocent appetites.

As heat and swarming crowds choke the city, the bodies of prostitutes begin turning up, slashed and mutilated by a pitiless hand—their flesh carved with strange symbols. Their gruesome murders are a final indignity worked on once-hopeful young women.

Some say the killings are the work of the Devil himself. Others hint that the Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, has crossed the Atlantic to resume his bloody career. Yet the city’s power brokers—afraid of any publicity that would harm the Exposition—turn a blind eye to the victims.

As the bloody summer wears on, only one thing is clear: it’ll be up to the working girls themselves to stop the carnage. And in The Buffalo Butcher, five of them will stand together to confront the killer . . . and to reclaim their humanity.

An important new novel by Robert Brighton, acclaimed author of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency™ Mysteries.

Purchase:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3NR1afW

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-buffalo-butcher-robert-brighton/1144201565

Excerpt:

From the Prologue: 

The coroner’s conclusion was brief. Willful murder by person or persons unknown. Cause of death, exsanguination due to severed left carotid artery. On autopsy, it was determined that Dirty Legs Lizzie hadn’t been too far from the grave, the Butcher notwithstanding. Years of heavy smoking had damaged her lungs, ten or twelve whiskeys a night had rotted her liver, and her heart was almost twice the normal size. She likely would have been a dead woman in a few years, or a few weeks, depending. But that, of course, didn’t change the fact that she had been hurried along to the next world by a very sharp instrument, which the medical examiner assessed to have been a straight razor. 

This came as something of a surprise. Most everyone had expected the murder weapon to be, of course, a butcher’s knife, but even the keenest of those would have left a bigger kerf—the width of the cut. The blow that killed Dirty Legs was a slice more than it was a cut, and the fine, stiff steel of a man’s razor would have been both sharp and strong enough to make the fatal incision. 

The incision itself had started deep on the left side of Lizzie’s throat, deep enough to find the carotid artery buried an inch under the skin below the ear. That would have been enough to finish her in a matter of a few minutes—the blood loss from a severed carotid is catastrophic— but the killer had an apparent penchant for symmetry and had drawn the blade in an ascending and ever shallower arc across the front of the throat and then to rest against the opposite clavicle. 

Without the carotid’s supply of blood to the hungry brain, unconsciousness—or at least shock—would have been almost instantaneous. Yet the swooning brain would still command the heart to keep working, harder and harder, compounding Lizzie’s problem as her blood pressure dropped. In only a few minutes her heart would have so little fluid left to pump that it would have to accept defeat and stop entirely. 

This was precisely how flocks of sheep and trainloads of cattle went to their deaths every day, not two blocks from Lizzie’s murder, but no one—not really—had thought much about how it actually worked. 

But now it was most of what occupied the minds of the prostitutes of the Tenderloin, as if they hadn’t already more than enough to contend with. Their better sort clucked their tongues, the ministers railed about the wages of sin, and the newspapers secretly wished for another murder. 

That wish would be granted, and soon. 

Meanwhile, only a few trolley stops north of Vine Alley, the Pan-American Exposition—the Electric City—was finally getting going in earnest. May, and most of June, had been cool, but the weather had at last begun to cooperate. As July approached, the fair, the heat, and the killing were all about to reach a climax.

GIVEAWAY

Blitz-wide giveaway (INT) ends January 18

• $25 Amazon gift card

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/d04251235658/

AUTHOR BIO:

Award-winning author Robert Brighton is an authority on the Gilded Age, and a great believer that the Victorian era was anything but stuffy. In his Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries, Brighton exposes the turbulence of the era - its passions, dreams, and disasters - against a backdrop of careful research on the places, sights, sounds, and smells of the time. 

When he is not walking the streets in the footsteps of the Avenging Angels, sniffing out unsolved mysteries, Brighton is an adventurer. He has traveled in more than 50 countries around the world, personally throwing himself into every situation his characters will face - from underground ruins to opium dens - and (so far) living to tell about it. 

A graduate of the Sorbonne, Paris, Brighton is an avid student of early 20th Century history and literature, an ardent and relentless investigator, and an admirer of Emily Dickinson and Jim Morrison. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their two cats. 

Author links:

https://robertbrightonauthor.com/

https://www.instagram.com/avengingangeldetectiveagency/

https://www.pinterest.ca/robertbrightonauthor/ 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7975296.Robert_Brighton