Book Review: Jack Knife, by Virginia Baker
I saw a familiar face at LTUE, but was having a hard time placing it. You know how that is, when you bump into somebody from (for instance) the comic-book store while you're seeing an off-Broadway show?
Virginia Baker worked with me at Novell, and I recall a couple of occasions when we talked about how cool it would be if we could each pursue our interests rather than Novell's.
Well, there she was at LTUE last weekend, showing off her first book, Jack Knife, published by DAW. I was thrilled (once I figured out why she looked so familiar), even if her book is not yet making her enough money to ditch the software industry in favor of a pursuit that consumes the soul WITHOUT breaking the spirit.
We swapped books, and I think I came out ahead. Jack Knife is a tale of Victorian England, Jack the Ripper, and three unfortunate time-travellers. If you can get past the time-travel itself, and the too-high-tech gadgets the folks from 2007 are carrying back into the past, you'll probably love the book. Ginny (sorry -- Virginia will always be "Ginny" to me) did her homework on this one. Jack Knife has all the elements of a great horror tale, and blends them with the additional horror of how nasty Whitechapel was a hundred and twenty years ago.
You can get the book at Amazon, or anyplace else that sells mass-market paperbacks, but yours won't be signed.