Butcher's Daughter

“You want to know the true tale of the wicked woman, the murdering monster, what baked the pies that she filled with the bits of her victims? The talk of London Town. I will tell you what you want to know, if it be the last that I do tell. And it may well be.” Enclosed herewith: the hitherto untold story of Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd’s infamous partner in crime—a bloodcurdling correspondence of profound horror and intrigue. London, England, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Police for review. It contains a curious correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. Rumours have swirled about Mrs. Lovett since the disappearance of hundreds of unwitting men decades ago—but is it actually Lovett, even if the suspected woman swears against it? As the woman relays the harrowing account of her life—from her upbringing on Butcher’s Row in the unruly and perilous streets of Victorian London to her daring escape from a mad doctor—the correspondence unlocks an intricate mystery that brings Miss Gibson closer to the truth, even as that truth may cost her dearly.