The Butcher’s Hook: a dark and twisted tale of Georgian London

Janet Ellis's appealing debut novel is like a cross between Fanny Burney's Evelina and US crime drama Dexter… Ellis excels at the poetics of flesh. She writes with a keen eye for the texture of skin and the meat beneath. She vividly describes the slaughter of a calf, the wet thwack of the knife, the cleaving of muscle from bone, the hot rush of blood. Anne, we come to realise, is something of a sociopath. This is where The Butcher's Hook gets really interesting … There's a wit and a richness to the writing, a nice way with pastiche, and a real feel for the macabre. And, in Anne, she has created an engaging and at times daringly amoral heroine.