A novel that beats back our assumptions about the time of Jack the Ripper. Not the grim story of an unfortunate drunken prostitute killed before her time, but one of a young woman alive with all the emotional complexity of women today. Her intellect and beauty, both blessing and curse, have opened doors to both opportunity and threat. She sees lust as her means to lucre, her tender feeling toward one man as perilous, and the deadly obsession of another as merely the risk of her trade. Fleeing the hazards of love, and running from a man wanting her to pay for her crimes against his brother, Mary Jane Kelly must recover a valuable hidden necklace and sell it to gain the funds to leave London and start over elsewhere. Driven by powerful, conflicting emotion, she runs the dystopian labyrinth of the East End, and tries to sneak past the deadly menace that bars her exit.