Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad faces the most shocking case of its existence, in the extraordinary new historical thriller from the bestselling author of The Yard and Red Rabbit. London, 1890: Four vicious murderers have escaped from prison, part of a plan gone terribly wrong, and now it is up to Walter Day, Nevil Hammersmith, and the rest of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad to hunt down the convicts before the men can resume their bloody spree. But they might already be too late. The killers have retribution in mind, and one of them is heading straight toward a member of the Murder Squad—and his family. And that isn’t even the worst of it. During the escape, the killers have stumbled upon the location of another notorious murderer, one thought gone for good but now prepared to join forces with them. Jack the Ripper is loose in London once more. Praise for Alex Grecian's The Black Country “Ripe with gory details…[Grecian] has a flair.”— The New York Times Book Review “Devilishly dark…It isn’t often that a mystery-thriller enthralls so completely…but as usual with Mr. Grecian, there is more to this tale than complex plotting.”— The Huffington Post “Grecian creates an eerie atmosphere from start to finish, and without giving anything away, the killer here is creepy and unexpected.”—Bookreporter.com Alex Grecian is the national bestselling author of the The Black Country and The Yard , the debut novel of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, as well as the long-running and critically acclaimed graphic novel series Proof . He lives in the Midwest with his wife and son. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.*** Copyright © 2014 by Alex Grecian PROLOGUE     LONDON LATE APRIL 1890   The white canvas hood covered his nose and eyes and ears, but there was a slit near the bottom of it for his mouth. He could hear muffled sounds, low voices when his captors entered his cell, direct questions when they were spoken close to his ear. When they asked him things, he could feel their hot breath through the canvas, on his cheek and on his scalp, and it raised goose bumps along his arms and the back of his neck, an almost sexual thrill. He could see floating halos of light whenever they brought a lantern into the room, a pale orange haze. They had cut off his long black beard where it curled out from under the edge of the hood. He had been proud of that beard, and the loss of it hurt him almost as much as the abuse his captors heaped on him. He could breathe through his nose, but inhaling caused the canvas to snug up against his face unless he kept his breath shallow. When he breathed through his mouth, through the hole in the canvas, his tongue dried out, and when he tried to swallow he felt an unpleasant clicking sensation at the back of his throat. They never gave him enough water. Food came once a day, barely enough to keep him alive. He couldn’t smell it, could barely taste it. They fed him, poking chunks of bread through the slit in the hood and into his mouth. It was dry and hard, but he choked it down. They spooned broth through the slit and past his lips, spilling it into the rough fabric and dripping it down his naked chest. The heat from it made his skin itch. He still tried to scratch himself, and tried to reach for those men when they came, but his wrists were chained to the wall behind him and his ankles were shackled. The irons bit into him, but the wounds had scabbed over and had bonded with the shackles so that they seemed to be a part of him now. It was this last detail that had convinced him they were never going to let him go. If they tried to remove those shackles, they’d have to rip them out of his skin. He accepted that they meant to keep him here, wherever this was, for the rest of his life. But he didn’t want to die. Even here, in the dark and the silence, he still wanted to live. So he ate their bread and their broth and he sipped at the ladleful of water they gave him twice a day, and he tried not to think about his absent beard. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. A month? A year? More? The men came every day in shifts, sometimes one at a time, sometimes three or four at once. Always men; never a woman. He had long ago decided that he must be in a small room made of stone, no more than ten feet across and ten feet deep. The ceiling was low, not even six feet, but the shackles prevented him from standing anyway, and so it presented no great hardship for him. Some of the men who came had to stoop as they moved around him. He had learned to recognize the voices of all the men by now. He listened to the way they moved, to the pace of their shoes on the stone. He would know any of them if he met them in the street, even on the darkest of nights. Two of the men were familiar to him from his life before, when he had been a free man. He was sure of it. Something in their voices, something in the way they walked. They had pursued him and he had led them on a merry chase, but in