Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed
sarradee avatar reviewed on + 47 more book reviews


This is a fascinating account of how popular author Patricia Cornwell and her team of forensic scientists discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper by using modern methods to analyze turn of the century evidence.

According to her, Jack wasn't any of the people that have been so publically accused. It wasn't that he was so much smarter than the police (although they did seem to ignore quite a bit of evidence), it was that Jack was so much ahead of his time. The technology simply wasn't available.

I'd heard several negative reviews of this book, which fortunately didn't make my interest lessen because I would have been sorry to have missed it. If you're looking for Scarpetta and Marino, yes, you will be disappointed, this isn't fiction with all the fictional twists and turns. The genre is true crime, and sometimes true crime can be a little tedious compared to a novel, because of all the pesky facts.