In all his years on the force, Detective Chief Inspector Pendragon had never seen a corpse like this one. After the initial horror, he recognised the reference to the surrealist painter, Magritte. But that made the crime even more sickening - accomplished, as it had been, with a sickening ferocity which placed it in another league from common or garden homicide. In the Whitechapel area of London in the 1880s, a person, who remains unidentified to this day, committed a series of sadistic murders of local prostitutes, which involved elaborate mutilation of the victims' bodies. Although the contemporary crimes are not directed exclusively at female targets, there is grotesque similarity in the mindset of the two perpetrators - divided, as they are, by more than a century. But Pendragon is determined that his pathologically brilliant killer will not escape detection. "The Art of Murder" reveals Michael White's mastery of a crime genre that he is making uniquely his own.

 

Michael White has been a professional musician, a science lecturer, newspaper columnist, science editor for GQ magazine and a series consultant for the Discovery Channel's The Science of the Impossible. First published in 1991, he is now the author of 27 books, including the bestselling Equinox and The Medici Secret. He was awarded the Bookman Prize in the US for best popular science book of 1998 for his biography of Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Curtin University. He lives in Perth, Australia with his wife and four children. For more information visit Michael White's website at www.michaelwhite.com.au