Savannah sleeps under a veil of river fog… and wakes to a nightmare.When a woman is found along the waterfront-posed with Victorian precision, throat cut clean-Detective Mara Lynwood is forced out of medical leave and back into the darkness she thought she escaped. The killer leaves a folded paper rose made from an 1888 newspaper, signaling one thing:Jack the Ripper has returned.Just not the one history remembers.As bodies surface across the city, each staged more theatrically than the last, Mara uncovers a chilling truth: someone isn't mimicking the Ripper-they're building a community around him. A cult of watchers. Commenters. Voters. A hidden digital world hungry for blood and spectacle.Then the killer leaves a message carved into a victim's shoulder:DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR LILY?Mara's past detonates. Her sister's disappearance twenty-five years ago wasn't random. It wasn't forgotten. It was the first chapter.Now a shadow known only as Whitequill is orchestrating a new canon of murder-training disciples, manipulating crowds, and using Mara's trauma as fuel.To stop the killings, she must follow a trail of origami cranes, childhood memories, Victorian philosophy, and a digital underworld that treats death like entertainment.But the final truth is worse than anything she imagined:Whitequill didn't come for the victims.They came for Mara.A haunting, atmospheric thriller drenched in fog, folklore, and psychological dread, The Ripper Within reimagines the legend for the modern age-and asks a terrifying question:What happens when evil goes viral? Claire Whitmore is a novelist whose work explores the shadowed intersections of human psychology, myth, and the supernatural. With a background in comparative literature and folklore, she weaves modern settings with ancient archetypes, creating stories that are both haunting and deeply human. Her fiction is known for its vivid characters, atmospheric worlds, and themes of identity, transformation, and the boundaries between reason and instinct. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon, where she divides her time between writing, hiking forest trails, and sipping far too much black coffee.
