Rating: 
Summary: Amazing!!
Review: This book is GREAT!! I'm a new Cornwell fan because of it. I have been somewhat interested in the "Ripper" case for years. Patricia's book has brought a dark figure into the light. Her uncanny ability to research and collect the proper data about "Ripper" never failed to amaze me as I read every page with anticipation.Miss Cornwell takes you back in time to a very real sense of the east end of London. The set-up of of the enviornment at that time creates the hunting ground for any sluth at heart to see the real story behind a mystery that is NOW solved. A must read.......
Darrin W. Owens
Rating: 
Summary: Case not closed
Review: What a disappointment - what a muddled mess. This book could never be mistaken for a scholarly analysis. Ms. Cornwall should have started with a paper published in a peer review of criminologists. But then again, she's a fiction writer with deep pockets - not a criminologist. She makes an interesting case, but destroys it with strong bias and supposition throughout the book. It seems at every point when she is describing the known facts of the case, and possibly related cases, she gets off track with baseless speculation. I began to wonder what Sickert was really like, since her portrayal was so strongly biased, I started to distrust it. Enough circumstantial evidence to bring Sickert to a Grand Jury - I doubt it. Her editor should have taken a strong hand to her manuscript. A suggestion: First describe the known events and facts. Then describe your suspect. Next, show how the circumstantial evidence connects the two. Then show how modern forensics science relates the two. Then, for fun, show how modern forensics techniques, applied 100 years ago, would have proven guilt, or not. And keep your bias out of the book. Keep to the facts, and only the facts. A very frustrating read and one I would not recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Ms. Cornwell, please stick to fiction.
Review: I admit, I have a sense for the morbid, but Cornwell has me beat by miles. This book was boring and disgusting and I can't really see why she was so compelled to write it. I hope whatever demon she had on her back has been laid to rest along with Jack the Ripper and all his "Unfortunates". It was too technical and tended to go off in all kinds of directions at one time. I couldn't tell if I was reading the same page over or if she was just repeating herself time and again. Really, she is a great writer. I love the Scarpetta series, not crazy about the Hammer series, but this stuff needs to go. Bring back Kay and chalk this one up to a waste of trees. Save your money, or if you feel you must read it, do like I did. Get it from your public library. I'll be returning my copy tomorrow.
Rating:
Summary: Case Closed - NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: I am sorry, this is nothing but sensationalism. Cornwell is being manuplitive, cashing in on the Jack the Ripper interest to push her books. It makes nice fiction, but she is off target in labelling Walter Sickert as the Ripper and borders on foolishness in saying case closed and Sickert was Jack.
If anyone bothered to see the BBC interview or read Stephen Knight's Book, you would have learned Sickert was involved in the whole mess, but she totally missed the point. Sickert was a player, a user, possibly a blackmailer - and conceivably was pointing out the targets as "Jack" hunted for Mary Kelly. But to claim 'case closed'....that is as false a claim as Sickert was the Ripper.
Rating: 
Summary: patricia is doing better with this book
Review: So, Patricia might not have solved the crime. She did an excellent job of describing life in England with regard to forensics, hospitals, morgues, women on the street, etc. Reminded me of the conditions in France before the revolution. I read every page of this book and enjoyed the intensity with which Patricia wrote.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book, but far too conclusory
Review: A little too conclusory for my taste. Shouldn't have titled it "case closed", but a wonderful book nonetheless that poses very interesting theories.
Rating: 
Summary: Silly Theory
Review: Most of the positive reviews here are from fans of Cornwell's books. The low ratings are from people who are more familiar
with the complexities of the Ripper case, not to mention a few
die-hard Ripperologist's opinions as well. Anyone quite familiar with the case could immediately dismiss her claims outright. At the time of the murders Scotland Yard gave SOME credence to only one letter among hundreds received at the news agencies. This is the famous FROM HELL letter which included a piece of a kidney (may or may not have been human) which MAY have come from one of the victims. All the others were considered hoaxes by the authorities, many determined to have been created by journalists to sell copy. Thus linking Sickert to a bunch of hoaxed letters tells us zip. If any of you want to read an excellent account of the Ripper case with only primary source material (ie actual coroner reports, news articles, etc during the time of the murders) and painstaking research I highly recommend Philip Sugden's Complete History of Jack the Ripper. This book details all the crimes from beginning to end with precise information giving you an idea of what the police were really up against.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Book But One HUGE Omission
Review: I just finished an advance of this book and, despite the circumstancial case Cornwell makes for Sickert being the Ripper, she doesn't address one key issue that keeps nagging at me. Throughout the study, Cornwell points to Walter Sickert's true guilt manifesting itself through the graphic depictions within his art, particularly the physical similarities between the prostitutes' mutilated bodies and his disfigured portraits of women. There are other interesting points to her thesis, such as a watermark on stationary (no distribution figures are offered nor is there any indication of the stationary's popularity) and a partial mitochondrial DNA match taken from a stamp (the researchers admit to the latter being potentially coincidental given the number of DNA combinations present). First off, I'm no Cornwell debunker or Sickert scholar so I could really care less who's right or wrong over this one, although I admit the book's subtitle "Case Closed" is misleading to say the least. But I DO know my rare books. And I know that a book by Alexandre Lacassagne entitled "Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques" was published in Paris in 1899, just one year after Sickert moved there to live and about six years before his "Ripper" paintings began to appear. Anyway, Lacassagne's work was a somewhat sensationalist book detailing the case of Joseph Vacher, a frenchman convicted and put to death in 1898 for the rape and murder of at least eleven women near Tournon. In one of the text's appendices, there is a chapter dealing with similar sadistic crimes, one of which is the Whitechapel/ Jack the Ripper killings. The crucial point is this: Lacassagne's book contains the first published photographs of two of the Ripper's victims: the gruesome bedroom photo of Mary Kelly and the morgue photo of Catherine Eddowes. Cornwell reiterates the point made by several prior researchers, that the photos did not appear in print until 1972 but this is not true. And this book is published in Paris exactly one year after Sickert arrives, a man who is profiled--by Cornwell and others--as being fascinated by criminality and sensationalism. Given the horrible impact of these photos, that can turn your stomach 100 years later, isn't it conceivable that these would have been distributed and possibly reprinted in various sources, especially Parisian newspapers and periodicals? How could they not be? Even more striking is the fact that these are the EXACT two killings that Cornwell points to again and again as evidence of his guilt in his art. Does she not find it odd that the Sickert paintings often contain the same angle and viewpoint of the victim as the crime-scene photos, i.e. the slanted right profile of Eddowes and the left side of the bed for Mary Kelly? Added to this is the fact, admitted in the book, that Sickert often worked from photographs or recollections of photographs. Sorry, but the fact that they failed to even acknowledge that photos of the crime scenes were published and circulated seventy years before the date quoted (1972) makes me wonder what else they overlooked and/or suppressed. One has to wonder. What's more, it's downright embarrassing how ignorant Cornwell appears to be with regard to the trends and common practices of 19th century art and artists. If you're going to form your central thesis around the notion of "violent art = violent artist", then surely Goya MUST be guilty of dismemberment ("This Is Worse") and eating his own children ("Saturn") and likewise, even Cornwell herself MUST be guilty of murdering the real-life equivalents of those in her novels. Sickert, an arrogant misogynist? Yes. Jack the Ripper? Perhaps . . . but just perhaps. Still, an entertaining read. Just read it critically.
Rating:
Summary: Approach This Book with an Open Mind
Review: I don't like the pompous title and I don't like Cornwell's tendency to use phrases such as "heartwrenching" and "in shambles". But that's the end of my criticism. This is a fascinating book, my first exposusre to Cornwell, but not my last. To the repeated assertions on these web pages that the Ripper letters are "known to be hoaxes," I say that 110-plus years of repeating a falsehood does not make it true. Cornwell ACKNOWLEDGES that the letters are almost universally considered to be hoaxes; her theory is that they are NOT. Her theory may be wrong; most Ripper theories are wrong, since they cancel each other out. But her case is as convincing as anyone's, and makes a darned good book. The tendency of the 19th-century police to dismiss evidence is chillingly like the same tendency now. Perhaps Sickert even had a normal sex organ and a normal sex life; that does not mean he was not violently misogynistic, as his art indicates. That's a common failing. You can find it in these "reviews."
Rating:
Summary: Patricia Cornwell tries to close the case of Jack the Ripper
Review: Ripperologists have a passion that rivals that of Talmudic scholars and an ability to savage any position that runs counter to their own. Therefore, it is not surprising that Patricia Cornwell's attempt to close the case of Jack the Ripper would be met with disdain, hostility, and outright invective. Of course Cornwell claim that the artist William Sickert was Jack the Ripper is open to debate. We need to remember that EVERYTHING involving this case is open to debate. One of the initial decisions you have to make in trying to reason out the real identity of the Ripper is to determine who his victims were. Even the acceptance of the canonical five (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, and Mary Kelly) is a basic assumption that is easily called into question. Stride and Eddows were both killed the same night; Strides body was not mutilated, the assumption being the killer was interrupted. The horrible mutilation to Eddows' face is assumed to be because the Ripper was enraged that he had been interrupted in his first killing. But what if Eddows had not been killed? Would we still assume Stride was a victim of the Ripper? If Eddows had been the sole victim that night what motivation would we have ascribed to her mutilation? Any and all assumptions made to deduce the Ripper's identity are debatable. For most people familiar with this case the most astounding part of Cornwell's case against Sickert is the argument that he wrote MOST of the Ripper letters. The assumption has always been that only one or two of the letters might have been real, so Cornwell is making a radical argument in this regard. Ultimately this is the strongest part of Cornwell's case, especially given her repeated observation that these letters are confessions as far as the law is concerned. Given the prolific number of letters Sickert wrote to newspapers in his life, it would not be farfetched that he would do the same thing as the Ripper. The other key part of Cornwell's argument is the psychological profile of Sickert. The problem is that this is more of a premise in the book than a cogently laid out argument, with bits and pieces scattered throughout the book. I think the problem is more organizational than argumentation and I would have appreciated a more clinical presentation of the profile. The weakest part of Cornwell's case is also her strongest. Cornwell dredges up everything from Sickert's life and work that she can use to pin these crimes on the artist (e.g., suggesting an unopened letter by his first wife given to her sister contained suspicions Sickert was the Ripper) and there will be times when you think she is pushing it. But the sheer volume of accusations is such that you have to be open to the possibility that some of them are valid. From an argumentative standpoint, she does not have to be right on ALL of these accusations to prove her point; she only needs to be right on some of them. One of the things that makes me think Cornwell might be right are the argument raised against her thesis. Cornwell repeatedly points out that she does not have "hard" proof of Sickert's guilt, so pointing out the inconclusiveness of her DNA matches is irrelevant. Yes, there is evidence that Sickert was in France during some of the killings, but Cornwell deals specifically with the problems of that evidence (Sickert claimed to be in France with friends who were no longer there, etc.). To be fair, it is hard to make substantial arguments against Cornwell's case in the context of a review limited to 1000 words, but you still have to deal with the specific points she raises. In the end Cornwell rests her case on an accumulation of coincidences sufficient enough to have Scotland Yard's Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve and an expert on the Jack the Ripper crimes to endorse her conclusion by saying he would be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor. One of the other things that works against "Portrait of a Killer" is that Cornwell uses more of a disjointed narrative structure than an argumentative one. The six murders that Cornwell ascribes to Jack the Ripper serve as a basic chronology for the book, but interwoven are chapters devoted to various parts of Walter Sickert's life that are unstuck in time. At one point I was convinced that maybe an editor had decided to rearrange these chapters and that I might be able to put all of them in a more traditional chronological order. With each of the murders Cornwell provides the main details and then talks about the limitations of forensic medicine at that time in contrast to what could be done today. "Portrait of a Killer" would work better if it were divided into a section that looks at the murders and then another making the case against Sickert. The book is illustrated with tinted autopsy pictures of the Ripper's five canonical victims, including one of the horrible human wreckage of Mary Kelly. Cornwell uses these images, not only as a way of remembering the victims, but usually with the additional goal of showing how they are reflected in Sickert's artwork. Certainly the book would have been enhanced by more reproductions of the various works by Sickert that Cornwell alludes to in making her case. As it is, the key examples here have to do with the Ripper letters, the Lizard House guest book, and sketches known to be by Sickert. Despite the presentational problems, "Portrait of a Killer" is going to be required reading for Ripperologists, all of whom will make of it what they will. Just be sure to read it before you dismiss it (or diss it). This is not something akin to the creative fantasy of Alan Moore's "From Hell."
| 
