Description: Herodias is pleased to introduce its first book for young adults, featuring Andy Dobson, the loafing, lying, and thoroughly lovable clairvoyant thirteen-year-old from London's East End. As Andy and his good friend, Lucy Catlett, solve one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries, they are sure to make their way into the hearts of countless teens and adult readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Italian sensation Claudio Apone has created a kind of young-adult fiction that makes R. L. Stine and J. K. Rowling seem tame by comparison -- a novel that is intelligent, provocative, totally real, and, by turns, frighteningly funny.

Andy, whose policeman father was killed by an organized-crime gang when Andy was very young, is looked after by his attractive, but out-to-lunch mum, Emma, the innkeeper of the Jack-in-the-Box, the lowly boarding house that has been in the Dobson family for generations -- all the way back to the time of Jack the Ripper, who murdered his last victim in Room 4, just upstairs from Andy's bedroom. The dusty, dilapidated, and totally creepy boarding house is now occupied by an assortment of misfits and crazies: Miss Carla Cooper, a beautiful Jamaican who says she is a hostess for British Airways; Hugo Drabber, an eccentric, over-fed gentleman whose hobby is building and flying kites; and Andy's Granddad, Bob, a flaming alcoholic who is an unending source of stories about Andy's family and the lore of the Jack-in-the-Box.

Andy and Lucy befriend a newly arrived boarder, Massimo, a chain-smoking, music-loving Italian graduate student who has come to London in hopes of finding new clues to Jack the Ripper's unsolved crimes. As this astonishing and bloodcurdling adventureunfolds, Massimo helps Andy enhance his clairvoyant gift to travel back in time to solve the grisly murder of Mary Kelly, the final victim of Jack the Ripper -- who may have been Andy's great-great-grandfather! But upon his return to the present, Andy is faced with another, more personally devastating crime. We are kept on the edge of our seats as the story takes some surprising and frightening turns before well-being is finally restored to the Dobson household.

My Grandfather Jack the Ripper has created a stir in Italy, where Claudio Apone has generated a cult following among teens. Young adults will be riveted by its historical subject and intrigued by its open and provocative treatment of a variety of adult themes that are sure to stimulate much discussion between parent and child, between friends, and among readers everywhere.

Please Wait