The place to be this spring is in the back of a hansom cab, not only taking in the teeming streets of Victorian London but also having sex. And unfamiliar, disturbing sex at that. In addition to such nonfiction blockbusters as A.N. Wilson’s The Victorians and Matthew Sweet’s Inventing The Victorians, two best-selling novels have re-examined Victorian sex and sex roles, particularly prostitution: Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Sarah Waters’ Booker-nominated Fingersmith.

What these works share with Gray’s historical thriller The Fiend In Human is a conviction that strange bedfellows were appearing willy-nilly in the 19th-century boudoir. One such interloper was the Industrial Revolution, the after-effects of which brought tensions to morals, money, and gender roles. Another partner was violence, and still another was media. The Ripper murders conflated sex, violence, and the technological and cultural reach of the press, which is why their shadows fall across our age.

It is 1852, and a “swell, fraud, and corrupter” is about to be hanged for the murders of several prostitutes. Among the ink-stained members of the press at Newgate is Edmund Whitty, the correspondent for London’s second-most-popular tabloid, The Falcon. The roguish Whitty is a would-be bon vivant with an opiates habit and a large gambling debt to a gang of rat-fight touts. While avoiding his creditors Whitty stumbles across a cover-up: namely, that the distinctive white-scarf strangulations are continuing even as the alleged culprit is behind bars, and that the powers-that-be have little interest in capturing the real killer.

Gray has whipped up a marvelous, richly textured confection. All the sights and sounds and impressions of a brilliantly evoked era are here, together with a dexterous plot and a feel for the embroidered yet briny language of the period. But the author’s sardonic, knowing tone, coupled with the novel’s moral targets – authority and hypocrisy – too often work against real feelings of suspense and horror. Because of this, the murders feel incidental, almost stylized. There’s a whiff of the puppetmaster in Gray’s narration, detaching readers from the characters and making these Victorians feel unbuttoned but not truly exposed.