Rating: 
Summary: Case not even close to closed
Review: Portrait of a killer is a poorly written book based on Patricia Cornwell's theory that Walter Sickert was the infamous killer, Jack the Ripper. I read the entire book waiting for the proof positive, but it never came. The so called evidence that Cornwell puts forward is nothing more than poorly drawn conclusions based on similarities in Sickert's use of certain phrases in his correspondence and that of the Ripper in his taunting of the police. She also makes much of Sickert's style and subjects in his paintings. This book was difficult to read because of its lack of a chronology of the murders, and because of its disjointed style.
Based on this book and Cornwell's "evidence", Walter Sickert is the least likely suspect I've come across.
Rating: 
Summary: NOT BAD BUT NOT CONVINCING
Review: I have only read one Patricia Cornwell novel, so I'm not a fan. This was a very interesting book on Jack the Ripper and kept me turning the pages. I got it as a gift and thought, "Oh great, another Jack the Ripper book." You can only read about the same five murders so many times before you know the stories by heart. But this book actually had something new to say. It interests me that PC could and would go back and reinvestigate the crimes. I thought the DNA off the Ripper stamps was an ingenious idea. However, although PC does a good job of making her case against the artist Walter Sickert, I would have to agree with People Magazine's review. All she's done is prove that Sickert probably authored some of the Ripper letters. Nice try, though. I thought John Douglas made a better case in THE CASES THAT HAUNT US in less than 100 pages.
Rating:
Summary: I expected much better of Cornwell...
Review: ARGHHHHHH.... It's so incredibly frustrating when someone who is known to be a good writer turns out such a tortuous and disconnected book as this one turned out to be. Cornwell obviously did the research, but the blasted book reads like a notebook of oddball notes she wrote to herself while doing the research, rather than in organized chapters presented in such a way as to make her case. She really should have known better than this. That is not to say that the information is not interesting, or that she could have made the case after this many years that this guy (if you can call him that) actually was the Ripper. The information seems to be there...what was the problem? A chapter on this guy's background and family, a chapter on his possible medical problems and the agony that must have accompanied it. A chapter on his wife and her family, a chapter on his presence in London during those times. A chapter on the massive amount of writing he did, and the comparisons between his writing and the Ripper's writings. A chapter on the possible victims elsewhere in England, and speculation of grisly finds on the Continent. This type of order would have made this book so much better. As it was, Cornwell seem to be writing in disassociated thought, which may be great for poetry, but is not a good methodology for history. Even if she was in a rush to get this book out before someone else, the publisher didn't bother to bring up the collosal disorganization of this book? A mortifying disappointment...this book goes to the library. Karen Sadler,
Science education
Rating: 
Summary: Case closed...Indeed!
Review: Ms. Cornwell's enthusiasm for detail, whether fictional or non fictional, is readable and almost poetic. The descriptions from which she attempts to sidestep are gruesome...but so thorough, one forgets she wasn't the coroner.
Her case against Sickert is certainly one which should be continuously researched and considered. She convinced me!
Rating:
Summary: Not even CLOSE to "CLOSED"
Review: There are many good books about Saucy Jack; this is not one of them. Cornwell's book is so error-strewn that I felt I was reading one of her works of fiction, rather than a "factual" treatise on the Ripper. If you have the gross egotism to put "Case Closed" on the jacket, you'd better have more to offer than some of the flimsiest "evidence" I have ever seen for convicting one of history's most notorious killers. (By the way, I personally do not subscribe to the notion that "Jack" was one person; at least two of the deaths attributed to him are sufficiently different that they were almost certainly not his handiwork. But back to Cornwell.) It's hard to know where to begin with the catalogue of mistaken information in this tome. Cornwell does a good, if transpontine job describing Victorian London, and she has obviously done her homework on the decidedly unpleasant Walter Sickert. But the praise ends there. She repeats so many myths, inaccurately reports so many facts, conjectures so many events and conversations, that when she does try to present scientific evidence (DNA, watermarks, etc.) one is already too suspicious to lend credence to her theory. She can't even spell the name of of one of the victims correctly; she gullibly repeats the error on Catherine Eddowes' grave marker and omits the "e" (thus, Eddows) from her last name. (Every other document, including her death certificate and contemporary police and newspaper reports, spells it with an "e".) Other errors in simple fact abound, too many to list, but so easily identifiable that one senses that her "researchers" were laughing all the way to the bank. So, too, were her editors and proofreaders; this book is replete with spelling mistakes, syntactical and grammatical errors, and an overall sloppiness in construction that destroys any credibility the author was hoping to establish. ...
Rating:
Summary: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Review: This book was a Christmas present. By April, I had only made it halfway through. Why? I haven't been able to read more than three pages without falling into a nice, deep sleep.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of a Creepy Guy ... And No Solid Proof
Review: I'll have to join the chorus of others who have already made the point that, while interesting, Ms. Cornwell's book falls far short of "closing the case" on the Ripper murders. She makes some interesting points, but relies far too much on coincidences, similarities, and "well it _could_ have happened like this." For me, by far the most interesting aspect of the book was its description of the living conditions in the poorer parts of London in the 1880s. Life was truly "nasty, brutish and short" for the lower classes in England then, and their suspicion -- even hatred -- of the police certainly contributed to the slipshod investigation of the crimes. The primitive forensic tools of that era didn't help either! So, overall, I'd give the book a marginal "thumbs up" -- but with the caveats already noted.
Rating:
Summary: If Only It Were Fiction
Review: I wasn't so much disappointed as shocked by this book. Maybe poor Ms. Cornwell is so used to writing fiction, that not being able to control the facts of her case, to write what she wanted, and tie up the neat ending she'd decided on when she typed "Chapter 1" into her computer made her crack. Certainly I wasn't shocked by the long, long passages on watermarks; I wasn't even shocked by the no-holds-barred descriptions of the disgusting life suffered by people living in the East End of Victorian London-- which incidentally I thought were the best part of the book. Few books on Jack the Ripper are so honest about the misery that drove Jack's victims to the desperation of street prostitution. What I was shocked by were occasions of outright dishonesty from a writer I had once admired. To begin with, Cornwell never lets on that Sickert has been connected with the Ripper murders before. In 1990 a woman named Jean Overton Fuller wrote a book called Sickert and the Ripper Crimes. Fuller, like Cornwell, detects shadows of the Rippers victims in many of Sickert's paintings, and like Cornwell, assumes that he must have committed the murders, not seen photographs of the bodies, or illustrations in the papers. Also, as far back as 1947, Sir Osbert Sitwell wrote that Sickert persistently spoke of knowing the identity of Jack the Ripper, because he once rented a room, which he landlady told him she had previously rented to a veterinary student who was Jack the Ripper. Apparently the landlady regaled Sickert with stories of the student's comings and goings, and Sickert loved to listen. More damning though, she states things such as this, on page 33: "With rare exceptions they [the Ripper's victims] were in their late thirties or early forties." The Ripper had five victims, according to the police at the time, four of whom were in their forties, and one of whom was twenty-five. Cornwell writes the word "exceptions" as plural, because she has added to the total murders outside the accepted provenance of Jack the Ripper, that she alone believes Sickert committed. Then on page 121, she states "if Sickert had seen [victim] Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have been shut by then, just as they are in her photograph." I couldn't believe it. I flipped through the illustrations in the book wondering whether I could trust my memory. Cornwell had included a copy of Mary Ann Nichols' mortuary photograph, but it is so vague, I could barely discern a face. The eyes were two black lines, and I could not fairly judge whether they were open or closed. I picked up a book ten years older than Cornwell's book, The Jack the Ripper A-Z. This book also includes Nichols' mortuary photo, and it is the same photo, with a half-circle tear on the right side. In the much clearer print of the photo in A-Z, Nichols' eyes are CLEARLY OPEN. Cornwell lied. She lied, to make a point; a point that Sickert once made a sketch of a woman resembling Nichols as she lay dead, but with eyes open. Cornwell claimed Sickert must have seen Nichols dead before the mortuary worker closed her eyes, as though Sickert were incapable of imagining her with open eyes. Then she published a deliberately vague photo in order to cover up the fact that Sickert may well have seen a photo of Nichols with her eyes open. I would not go on like this if it were one instance in a nearly 400 page book, but it's not. When Cornwell is not outrightly insulting the reader by condescendingly introducing background information as though the reader grew up in a hothouse, then she is slyly insulting by assuming the reader cannot question or double-check anything she says. And it may simply be that as a fiction writer she is too accustomed to writing in a vacuum, where the reader must accept everything she says. Maybe she intends no malice, and is just lousy at non-fiction, and should go back to novels, which she does well. I hope, I hope. I hope not, as another reviewer said, that this is all because she owns many Sickert paintings, which would go up in value if people believed he were Jack the Ripper.
Rating: 
Summary: Not convinced from page one
Review: Having never read a Ripper book before this one I was not sure what to expect. What I didn't expect was a biased conclusion on who the the Ripper was from almost page one, based on flimsy and circumstantial evidence from the start of the book. The author tried to convince and convict from an early point in her book that Walter Sickert was the murderer of the East End London women who had the musfortune to cross his path in late Victorian London. Evidence is circuital at best and far reaching at the worst; there is not a shred of direct evidence linking Sickert to the crimes he is accused of. If one eliminated the "could haves", "might haves","possiblys" and "maybes" this would have cut the book in half; having never read this author before I sincerely hope this is not her best effort.
Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: I had never read a Patricia Cornwall book before and never will again. This was one of the most poorly written books I have ever come across.
I bought this book after having seen Ms. Cornwall on a television special and I found her theory very intriguing. While I still find the theory intriguing, the book was anything but.
There is no logical structure to the book. She wanders aimlessly through the murders, sometimes chronologically, sometimes not. She includes only three Sickert paintings, although she discusses many, and those three paintings are printed in a muddied sepia tone and barely discernable. She writes, over and over again, about the lack of forensic science available to the police at the time and then goes into excruiting detail about what they MIGHT have done if they had the proper tools.She is constantly equivocating and making random generalizations. She does not cite any sources.
She states that she is staking her reputation on this theory. I believe it is her writing style that should ruin whatever reputation she may have.
Don't waste your time.
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