Details on the Carrie Brown case were found in R. Michael Gordon, The American Murders of Jack the Ripper;Michael Conlon’s and Wolf Vanderlinden’s articles and message-board posts at casebook.org; and Wolf Vanderlinden, “The New York Affair, Part III,” in Ripper Notes: America Looks at Jack the Ripper, July 2004 (sold through Amazon.com).

General historical background was supplied by D.J. Leighton, Montague Druitt: Portrait of a Contender; Martin A. Danahay & Alex Chisholm (eds), Jekyll & Hyde Dramatized;Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City; Dan Kurzman, Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906; George Garrigues’s website Los Angeles in the 1900s (apparently no longer online); the Los Angeles Chinatown Business Council, www.chinatownla.com ; and the Westland Network Web site on history of Venice, www.westland.net/venice/history.htm .

For psycholinguistics, I consulted two books by Andrew G. Hodges, Who Will Speak for JonBenet? and The Deeper Intelligence, as well as Katharine Ramsland, “Literary Forensics,” www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/literary/1.html .

One book that came to my attention as I was doing the final revisions on Riptide was The Secret of Prisoner 1167, by the late James Tully. In a carefully researched presentation, Tully argues that an escaped homicidal maniac named James Kelly was the Ripper. Whether or not this is true, it’s interesting to note that Kelly left England after the killings and traveled extensively in the United States, venturing as far west as Los Angeles.

Perhaps the saga of Edward Hare is not quite as far-fetched as I’d assumed...

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

RIPTIDE

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