Audrey and Uncle Jonathan perform an autopsy on murder victim Mary Ann Nichols and note the surgical precision of her wounds.

Uncle Jonathan reveals that murder victim Mary Ann Nichols once worked as a servant in the Wadsworth household.

Audrey and Thomas discover a diary entry linking an earlier murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith to the recent Whitechapel killings.

Audrey and Thomas travel to Reading and find former family valet Aldous Thornley gravely ill and near death.

Thornley cryptically mentions someone named Alistair before dying, leaving a crucial clue unfinished.

Audrey and Thomas find Alistair Dunlop at the London docks with his throat nearly severed and dying.

Uncle Jonathan is arrested on suspicion of being Jack the Ripper and removed from the investigation.

Uncle Jonathan is transferred to the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital to await trial for the murders.

Two more women are murdered while Uncle Jonathan remains imprisoned, effectively clearing him as a suspect.

Audrey defiantly returns to Uncle Jonathan's wrecked laboratory, openly flouting her father's ban on her involvement.

At a séance following Catherine Eddowes's funeral, a medium warns Audrey that she personally knows the killer.

Lord Wadsworth is seen leaving a lodging house with a woman who is found murdered the following morning.

Audrey accidentally opens a hidden door behind a family portrait and discovers a secret laboratory containing her mother's reconstructed corpse.

Nathaniel confesses to being Jack the Ripper and ties Audrey to a chair to draw her blood for his experiment.

Lord Wadsworth acknowledges Audrey's role in solving the murders and arranges for her to study at a forensic medicine academy.

Audrey Rose Wadsworth begins assisting her Uncle Jonathan with autopsies on the Ripper's victims, discovering a disturbing link between the murdered women and her own household. She and fellow apprentice Thomas Cresswell chase leads across London, interviewing dying witnesses and tracking a carriage driver who is murdered before he can speak. When Uncle Jonathan is arrested as a suspect and locked in Bedlam, two more murders occur in his absence and force the investigation in a new direction. Audrey defies her father's ban on her involvement and continues working the case until a séance medium delivers a chilling warning that she already knows the killer. Following her father to a suspicious lodging house leads Audrey to the most devastating revelation of all: a secret laboratory hidden inside her own home. There she confronts her beloved brother Nathaniel, who confesses to being Jack the Ripper before dying in a grotesque accident, and her father ultimately honors Audrey's courage by sending her to study forensic science abroad.

The headline events of the Jack the Ripper investigation.

Thomas enters Uncle Jonathan's forensic medicine lecture and stuns the class with his detailed deductions about a murder victim.

Thomas introduces himself to Audrey after the lecture and correctly deduces she is a girl in disguise.

Nathaniel reveals to Audrey that he is a member of the Knights of Whitechapel, a group patrolling for the killer.

Lord Wadsworth is questioned at Scotland Yard after being found wandering in Whitechapel during the period of the murders.

Thomas astonishes Audrey by correctly deducing intimate details about her family and her father's addiction from brief observation.

While searching her father's study, Audrey discovers a suspicious newspaper article about Emma Elizabeth Smith's earlier murder.

Superintendent Blackburn introduces himself to Audrey at Uncle Jonathan's ransacked laboratory and explains the grounds for the arrest.

Audrey visits Uncle Jonathan at Bedlam and finds him crouched in a corner, muttering incoherently after being sedated by staff.

Audrey secretly follows Thomas through the streets at night and catches him meeting a contact near Brookwood Cemetery.

Blackburn takes Audrey and Thomas to a newsroom where an editor has received a threatening letter signed by Jack the Ripper.

Lord Wadsworth reveals at the murder scene that Superintendent Blackburn is the suitor he has already chosen for Audrey.

Lord Wadsworth forbids Audrey from further investigating the murders and threatens to throw her out of the house.

Uncle Jonathan reveals that murder victim Emma Elizabeth Smith was once his fiancée before he chose science over love.

An angry man accosts Thomas with a knife in the East End, furious that his wife's body was used for research.

Nathaniel connects the stolen heart to a steam-powered machine inside their mother's chest cavity and prepares his final experiment.

The investigation takes shape through a series of encounters that build suspicion, forge alliances, and plant misleading clues. Thomas announces himself as a formidable intellect during Uncle Jonathan's lecture, while Nathaniel's membership in the Knights of Whitechapel positions him as a concerned brother rather than a suspect. Lord Wadsworth's own suspicious nocturnal wanderings and his controlling behavior toward Audrey add a layer of tension that repeatedly misdirects her attention. The investigation stalls when Uncle Jonathan is arrested and his lab ransacked, forcing Audrey to verify his innocence by exposing the sedation plot at Bedlam. As the body count rises, Audrey is caught between her father's attempts to marry her off to Blackburn and her growing partnership with Thomas, while Uncle Jonathan's private connection to one of the victims reframes the case entirely. The pool ends in Nathaniel's hidden laboratory as his monstrous plan reaches its catastrophic conclusion and Audrey watches her brother die.

The significant moments shaping the investigation behind the headlines.

Uncle Jonathan permits Audrey to attend his forensic lecture secretly disguised as a boy, granting her covert access to his work.

Audrey sneaks out alone to walk the streets of Whitechapel at night, determined to find clues about Miss Nichols's murder.

Thomas kisses Audrey on the cheek after she makes a sharp deduction about the murderer's identity, catching her off guard.

Blackburn arrives unexpectedly at the circus to warn Audrey that Uncle Jonathan's execution date is only five nights away.

Audrey tests a sample of Uncle Jonathan's porridge in Thomas's private laboratory and confirms it was deliberately laced with opiates.

Audrey examines the double-murder scene at Mitre Square with Blackburn, noting missing organs and a severed ear as the letter promised.

Nathaniel informs Audrey that Thomas's mother died of a gallbladder infection, prompting Audrey to suspect Thomas of the killings.

Uncle Jonathan examines a preserved kidney at Scotland Yard and predicts the Ripper will take the heart of his next victim.

Audrey and Thomas share a passionate kiss in the East End after narrowly escaping a knife attack.

Uncle Jonathan arrives covered in blood with the latest murder victim, whose heart has been removed exactly as he predicted.

Audrey resolves to confront her father directly, convinced he must have slipped away to commit the latest murder.

Lord Wadsworth arrives at Nathaniel's secret laboratory and orders his son to immediately release Audrey from the chair.

Thomas arrives at Nathaniel's laboratory and exposes Nathaniel's guilt by pointing to fresh cut marks on his fingertips from a hidden knife.

Nathaniel is fatally electrocuted when the metal syringe connects with the cage in his mother's chest during the reanimation experiment.

Nathaniel is buried beside his mother as Audrey struggles to process her grief and her brother's monstrous hidden crimes.

From the moment Audrey is smuggled into her uncle's lecture in disguise, the novel is driven by a series of revelations that upend assumptions and force new conclusions. Each clue Audrey and Thomas uncover points at a different suspect — her father, Thomas himself — while the true killer, Nathaniel, moves freely around her. A medium's warning at a séance, a confirmed opiate poisoning, and a predicted organ theft build toward an unbearable sense of dread. The passionate kiss Audrey and Thomas share in the East End marks a turning point in their relationship, even as the investigation closes in on a killer who lives under Audrey's own roof. Audrey's resolve to confront her father leads her instead to her brother's horrifying secret, and the chain of events that follows — Lord Wadsworth's arrival, Thomas's deduction, and Nathaniel's fatal electrocution — brings the story to its harrowing close. The pool ends with Nathaniel buried beside the mother he tried to resurrect, and Audrey left to grieve the brother she never truly knew.