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Summary: jack the ripper 101
Review: Very surprising after reading the her well-organized thrillers - this book is sloppy and you get the feeling she became increasingly disillusioned with her theory as she wrote it. She obviously knows very little about Jack and understands nothing about the artistic soul. After all, a gloomy artist like Sickert would have been fascinated by the case. She doesn't mention that he lived in rooms years after the murders and was told by the landlord that it had been lived in by the Ripper - of course he would paint it! Also, as for the man leaning over the woman in the painting in Ennui - everyone knew the Ripper was supposed to have approached his victims from the back and slit their throats. The only thing she has proved is that the mischievous letter writing Sickert probably wrote a couple of the 600 hoax letters - big deal!!
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Summary: THIS IS VERY GOOD
Review: I am a regular fan of Patricia Cornwell and, in general, I liked all her work, some more and some less. She is a good writer and a great detective. But what is really amaizing that I was able to understand all the professional information packed so tightly in to her books. Patricia made it simple to understand and to follow.Now this book is something different. We are talking about one of the classic cases which was never solved and which happend so long ago. Patricia was able to take it a part and to come up with a result. We can argue whether her conclutions are right or wrong but what difference does it make for a book? She convinced me and even that is not important. She presented a case where everything was lost and nothing is solid. There are only little pieces of information and a few clues and she logically put them together. I loved it. What is next, Patricia?
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Summary: The title: CASE CLOSED???!! WHAT???
Review: Cannot believe that a rich and well suceeded suspence novelist like Patrycia could write such junk, and, worse still, call it CASE CLOSED!
Rating:
Summary: Add another theory to the pile!
Review: Interesting theory but Case Closed? I don't think so! There are some remarkable points made here and should be read by anyone interested in Jack the Ripper. However Patricia Cornwell's policy of, there is no evidence to prove I'm right, but there is no evidence to prove I'm wrong so I must be right, just doesn't cut it, pardon the pun. As far as saying it must be true because the experts said they would arrest Sickert, anyone can find an "expert" to agree to anything. Doesn't mean as much as it used too! So all in all, read the book for a good possibility for who The Ripper was, but don't expect that we've put the mystery to bed just yet.
Rating:
Summary: Sloppy investigation
Review: If you're dead set to get a conviction, you see what you want to see. That's the cardinal sin of a police investigator. At the end of the 19th century there were certainly 5000 psychopaths in London. One of them turned into a serial killer. Others, even most respectable men, shared the dark fantasies acted out by the killer, much like the avid readers of reeky tabloids today. Part of Cornwell does, too. Man is a rather complex animal. The painter Sickert sure had a morbid mind and a faulty character, but that's not enough for a conviction. He hated women, yes, but that was a general characteristic of men at the time, when sex was as filthy and degrading as lust was rampant. A man who uses whores gets to despise himself, usually projecting that selfhate on women. It's still common. Somehow I expected Cornwell to deliver the final punch in the last chapter, instead everything is thrown into the first half of the book. Then it peters out in ever growing uncertainty. Take the issue of Sickert's penile defect, his "stump". What proof do we have for that? None, whatsoever. He was operated upon three times, sure. From that Cornwell surmises an amputation, or rather, insinuates it. But the reason for the repeated surgery might be as simple as a continued leakage. If Sickert was incapable of intercourse, shouldn't that at least be hinted at in the correspondence between the wife and her beloved sister? Sickert did in fact marry twice with fertile women.
Sickert reminds me of characters in her novels. It seems to her evil is related to physical handicaps. The crippled turns evil. Psychopaths are born evil (also a recurrent theme in her novels). Still she offers a staggering row of psychological reasons, childhood trauma's of all kinds. She's not very consistent. Most stunning is her treatment of the Ripper letters. First: all of them cannot be written by the same person. You can manipulate your handwriting, but it's very difficult to change it altogether - you can only change what's apparent to you, part of your style. You can hide it by writing in a childlike way or thorough calligraphy, but most of the letters are written in a off-hand way. Any criminal investigator would try to sort them in two groups - those whose style and content somehow match, and the others. He would then proceed checking if any of the letters contained information only known to the police. Cornwell doesn't. There's also the possibility that the devious Sickert wrote some of those letters and still did not commit the crimes. A Piries & Sons stationery shows that the writer is not a poor bloke, but if it was mainly used by civil servants, any clerk could be the writer. The DNA comparison of Ripper and Sickert letters is an anticlimax. It's simply not conclusive. After that setback Cornwell weakens her case by presupposing - without any kind of substantiation - that Sickert was gambling on racetracks (serial killers usually don't, they want control) and sharing with us her hunch, that the wife really "suspected the truth about her husband". There are comical parts, too, like when she in a painting in the painting "Ennui" discovers a man coming up behind a lady with bare shoulders. With such investigative techniques, she could make a wonderful case against Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt or Grosz. And she complains that Sickert's father had no respect for authorities - as if that would not be a rather healthy attitude for a German in the 19th century. I mean, Sickert's father read Heinrich Heine, too. The London police was heavily prejudiced when hunting the Ripper, but so is Patricia Cornwell.
Rating: 
Summary: Just not very good
Review: I am an attorney with a background in editing, so I am familiar with investigative techniques as well as what constitutes good writing. I also have an interest in this area, but have concentrated mostly on reading books that either present information objectively (i.e., do not put forth a theory about the identity of the Ripper) or reproduce the original file materials still in existence. In my opinion, this is not a well-researched, well-written, or objective book. Ms. Cornwall suffers from the same problem that many of the Ripper authors do--she starts with a pet theory, a pre-conceived solution, and then sees the evidence the way she wants to see it in order to "prove" her theory. What has she proved? Well, if you can follow her badly presented explanation of DNA evidence and how it works, she has proved only that Sickert may have written some of the Ripper letters. Not much of a payoff for a book subtitled, "Case Closed." Still, it would have been a worthwhile read if it had been organized better. The book felt like it was rushed into production. I was quite disappointed, since I had read a couple of the Scarpetta novels and was looking forward to at least a decent read, which I didn't get.
Rating: 
Summary: And the verdict is......
Review: I gave this book four stars because of Patricia Cornwell's excellent writing style. She is very smart, of course, but writes with a smoothness little known in this genre. She certainly does provide convincing tidbits about Jack the Ripper, enough perhaps to make some people believe her choice of killers did it, but I had to think about reasonable doubt. So long after the infamous crimes, it is inevitable that Ms. Cornwell would be unable to collect enough physical evidence, even in conjunction with Scotland Yard, to prove her case. If I were a juror, I would have to plead not guilty. There is more than reasonable doubt, and some of her "facts" (for want of a better word) are definite stretches. In my heart, she almost has me convinced, but there is still that little bit of "almost" hanging around that insists this case is not closed. Having read most, if not all of Ms. Cornwell's books, I'm more on the believer side, as she is indeed an excellent forensic pathologist, usually in the person of Kay Scarpetta. I also thought that she gave Scotland yard an unfair shake, considering what they had to work with back then, often it sounds as though she blames the nearly unsolvability of the case on their shabby police work, when in fact, they simply did not have today's technology. She also balances this at point with some commendations for Scotland Yard, but I ended up feeling she was not pleased with their work back in the Jack the Ripper days and thought that even with little technology, they could have done better. It's your turn to be the juror.
Rating:
Summary: Good technical book
Review: This book reads more like an "Unsolved Mysteries" on A&E rather than a novel. I bought this for my wife - and she really enjoyed reading it. If you are interested in Jack the Ripper - and would like to read about specifics of the case - including autopsies, etc - this is a book for you.
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Summary: Who do you think you're kidding?
Review: Until now I've been a big fan of Patricia Cornwell and her Kay Scarpetta novels - but this book is [not good]. The only reason I read it through to the bitter end was to see if it could really get any worse - and it did. I have never come across so many examples of "may have", "possibly", "perhaps", "could have", "no reason why not" in a single book and, on this showing, I would hate to be on the receiving end of Patricia Cornwell's notion of "conclusive evidence"! However, more than the fact that the book is entirely unconvincing, it's extremely badly written and put together. In places it seems almost thrown together at random. In short, it's one of the worst books I've ever read: a complete waste of time and money.
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Summary: FBI & Scotland yard expertsfound Sickert worthy of scrutiny.
Review: The author asked Scotland Yard's John Grieve about this book, and his reply was as follows: "I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants. If we didn't get any more evidence than what we've got now, we'd be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor." FBI profiler, Ed Sulzbach, stated: "There really aren't many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid." Always go to people who are qualified to speak about a subject--like the two above. Anyone else here or elsewhere may have an opinion about this book, but such "opinions" may or may not have anything to do with reality. If you're still skeptical, the book is at the library.
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