Title: It’s All in the Genes
Author: Cara Cooper
In: The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories (Maxim Jakubowski)
Rating Out of 5: 4 (Really good read!),
My Bookshelves: Contemporary, Crime, Easy reading
Dates read: 26th September 2019
Pace: Slow
Format: Short story
Publisher: Robinson
Year: 2015
5th sentence, 74th page: She never sits still, is always up and about, and fiddles with everything.
She thinks that she’s finally found the love of her life. But, when she finds out that he’s been seeing another woman… she might just crack.
This was a nice, creepy little contemporary take on the Jack the Ripper mythos. For starters, it is in present day and deals with his descendants. For another, it is written from the point of view of one of these descendants. You spend most of the time wondering who is about to get themselves murdered… and just what genetics do mean for the serial killer gene… or if there even is one. Actually, this definitely swayed me towards the belief in a serial killer…
Nature versus nurture is a constant debate. One that seriously fascinates me. This tends more to the angle of nature. That genes can give us certain tendencies that aren’t great. Alright, not great is an understatement… this is talking about serial killers with no real purpose other than death. It makes yo concerned for who the real descendants of Jack the Ripper could be… if there are any (I’m kind of hoping not).
The flip in the culprit of the story took me completely by surprise. I like that there were two people who had a genetic tendency to be killers. The genetics aren’t really what I blame their actions on (we’re all masters of our own fate), but it still made things incredibly tense and spine tingling as I read about the different backgrounds of two people who aren’t overly nice. But it does raise a number of questions.
Earth and Skye 
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