The Strange Michael Folmer Affair
by
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"Hours later and with his face prickly with stubble he awoke. The room was cold and he knew it was night. The fog shadows were no longer there but although his mind had cleared he felt exhausted and drained by the mental trauma of the afternoon. The big house was still as he climbed the dark stairs, the one stair on the bend nearing the top creaking as it had since he was a child, and within a few minutes he had found the warmth and comfort of his mother’s bed. There were no dreams that night, just the black nothingness of how he imagined death would be, but suddenly, as the first sparrow chinked at the cold dawn, breaking the silence of the night, he woke, eyes wide and fear causing his empty stomach to churn.
The memory had come to him in his waking moments: that evening in The Gun, the girl with her pretty eyes, smiling and joking with Gregory as he bought her crisps and the dark-haired foreign-looking detective watching them over his glass of beer. Suddenly, as the turn of a switch illuminates a darkened room, all was clear and he knew that he was being watched. The fat policemen with the ridiculous name, the local beat copper or whatever he was, who had driven by the house on a Sunday morning, he could accept. But Gregory’s assistants? In Palmers Green?"
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About the Book
Following the murder of a prostitute in London’s East End Detective Chief Inspector Mike Gregory of New Scotland Yard is deputed to investigate what seems to be the emergence of a crazed killer bent on emulating the crimes of nineteenth century Jack the Ripper.
With his marriage failing and plagued with self-doubt, Gregory pits his wits against the serial killer but when the fingerprints on a letter sent by the murderer appear to match those of a man hanged for murdering a prostitute almost fifty years earlier the enquiry takes and bizarre and unprecedented turn.
As he pieces together the fragile threads of the case, you will follow Gregory through the sewers of Victorian London to the West End of the fifties and into the present day, culminating with the shocking and grisly final attempt of the killer to replicate the last murder of his sickening 1888 predecessor.
An essential read for “Ripperologists” and all devotees of crime fiction, “Folmer” is an intriguing and fascinating tale of a modern serial murderer, and as well as examining the Victorian crimes and the sordid underbelly of 1950’s Soho, the reader is afforded a fascinating close-up view as the murderer descends into madness.About the Author
John Rigbey is an ex-detective officer of the Metropolitan Police. Leaving the force in 1972, he formed what is now one of the leading private investigation company in the south-west of England. He has almost half a century of experience of the criminal justice system and is regarded as being an authority on London’s underworld of the sixties and seventies.
He has been a regular contributor to an assortment of legal and similar publications over many years.
He lives in Devon, England.