Summary

Detective Ryan and Constable Becker are knocking on doors on Paternoster Row, hoping to find someone in the publishing district that lives on site. An elderly man is able to provide them with books written by Thomas De Quincey and informs them that De Quincey actually wrote three essays about murder and promised his next work would be titled ‘Confessions of a Murderer.’ Instead, the essays were produced. Both are stunned by the fact that De Quincey praises the murders, calling them sublime and superb. He also seems to be aware of details that only the police and the killer could have known.

The details of the most recent murders also mesh with the Ratcliffe Highway murders in many ways, although in the most recent killers, the murderer has gone a little further and the original murders happened in two...