My Ripper Hunting Days can be enjoyed simply as an historical murder mystery, but I suspect Bernard Boley’s true intentions lie elsewhere. He has written a picaresque drama about courage and personal responsibility and the consequences of family legacy. Its theme is not only how individual lives may be shaped by the course of history but how history itself is shaped by the actions of individuals. Ambitiously, several of the novel’s most important characters are kept on the periphery of the tale, and the Jack the Ripper murders are illuminated largely by subordinating them to the unfolding of Riley’s individual destiny. These are risky literary manoeuvers, but the author pulls them off magnificently. This is a thoughtful, skillfully plotted and fascinating work that shines with intelligence, David Green, Ripperologist Magazine, December 2016. While adventuring on Grosse Isle somewhere on the Saint-Lawrence river in Canada, a young man finds a well-preserved diary of an Irishman named Woodrow Reily, who worked at the London Hospital and was held at the Grosse-Isle quarantine station near Quebec City having caught typhus while crossing the Atlantic and now maybe dying of pneumonia. He wrote how he met a man named Francis Tumblety, an actual Jack the Ripper suspect, and befriended him, but soon after becomes convinced this man is Jack the Ripper. Protected by a rich Irishman who guides him in his pursuit, he falls in love with his daughter, keep risking his life in his quest and has to choose between finding the Ripper and losing his loved one. The more evidence he gathers, the more he believes the East End murders may only be pieces of a larger puzzle in which Tumblety seems to be playing an important part. Will he get the whole picture and capture Tumblety the Ripper? Was he really hunting Tumblety, the Ripper or someone from his past, a dark past he even denies having gone through? You shall find out once you grab a copy of Reily’s diary, ‘My Ripper Hunting days’.
