The cry of a victim of Jack the Ripper? Possibly. It might also be the cry of most true-crime fans who are simply sick of books about Saucy Jack. The good news is that this one, coming after a bloody siege of tomes that "honored" the Ripper's 125th anniversary last year, is not one that speculates all that much on what famous artist or Royal was actually a psycho killer. It's about another facet of the fascinating case...some crimes that the madman did not take credit for via jeering letter...and ones that didn't quite fit the pattern of technique and location.
The authors take into consideration the theories that include Saucy Jack fleeing Whitechapel to continue his vicious assaults in New York. Or Nicaragua. While many tomes of this type tend to be exploitive, and written by purple-prose dripping hacks, the authors here tend more toward surgical dissection of facts. After all, this book doesn't come from some penny-dreadful publisher, or worse, an eBook company; it's from Yale University Press. Not drily scholarly, there are plenty of chills for the average Ripper-fan as the scenes of carnage are examined, as well as the testimony of the few women who managed to survive Ripper (or Ripper copycat) attacks.
After 125 years, there's still a lot of misinformation and mythology about Jack the Ripper. The authors do deal with some of that. There will probably never be a definitive answer to who the murderer and taunting letter-writer was, and if it was one on the list of most logical suspects (Kosminsky, Klosowski, Pizer, Tumblety or Druitt). But this book honors and focuses on victims of violence...women who should not have died, whether at the hands of the Ripper or some other madman, including: Jane Beardmore, Annie Millwood, Emma Elizabeth Smith, Martha Tabram and Ada Wilson.
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