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Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper Case Closed Patricia Cornwell 9780425192733 Books

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Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper Case Closed Patricia Cornwell 9780425192733 Books

Patricia Cornwell's book left me very unimpressed. I have read all her Kay Scarpetta novels, and I don't remember feeling that they were full of holes and fluff, like I felt with this book.
Unfortunately, I feel that instead of doing the research first and making her conclusion based on that research, instead she came to her conclusion and built the research around it. Her psychological "profiling" seems completely fabricated. She takes quotes completely out of context. She refers to artwork and paintings of Sickert's that she doesn't include. The whole book seems like an essay that she had a word count to complete, and she's filling in with alot of fluff because she doesn't have enough meat or real evidence to make her case.As far as the much-ballyhooed DNA evidence, even that wouldn't hold up in court, much less the court of my armchair. Even if it conclusively proved that Sickert's DNA was on a letter that was signed "Jack the Ripper" that couldn't possibly prove that the letter writer was also the murderer.
I'm very disappointed in the book as I thought it would have a much more scholarly feel to it. Probably only dedicated collectors of all things Ripper will want to read this as it probably does, at the very least, bring a few new things to light.


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Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper Case Closed Patricia Cornwell 9780425192733 Books Reviews

With Ms. Cornwell's considerable forensic skills highly advertised and on display, I was expecting much more. Thus, it is an understatement to say that I was disappointed in this fictionalize non-fictional hunt for Jack the Ripper.

It seems to me it did not take highly touted forensic skills to rummage through history's dustbin. Do so in a very disjointed way; throw out a few rehashed random facts and theories, and then add a few of your own -- like Walter Sickle's paintings and a concocted theory about his missing testicle or "penile or anal fistula" -- and then like magic claim them to be the holy grail and the missing link to the Ripper's murders.

To her credit, Ms. Cornwell does go through the motions of building a circumstantial case. She draws on paper watermarks, on graphology and handwriting analysis, mitochondrial DNA analysis, and then delves quite extensively into Walter Sickert's eccentricities.

However, this all seems to have come together in a contrived way. Sickert had been waiting in the wings all along to save the storyline. Suddenly, Sickert was trotted out just as the story was about to fall apart due to lack of any semblance of convergence. It all came together so quickly, and in such a disconnected way it left the reader the impression it had been done as a last ditched plot-saving desperate act to find a neat ending -- as a way of pulling together almost by fiat, so many disparate threads that could never come together otherwise.

Maybe I was expecting too much to think that with newer forensic techniques there would be a neater more conventionally linear scientific convergence of the existing evidence. In this version, there was no convergence at all. We simply were led down one primrose path after another all to dead-ends; and then suddenly, as if a bolt from the blue, in walks old "one nut" Walter Sickert and his paintings to save the day for Ms. Cornwell's story and presumably her reputation.

Two stars
Patricia Cornwell's recently released Portrait of a Killer Jack the Ripper Case Closed claims to have brought closure to the century old Jack the Ripper murders. She stakes her claim on the innumerable number of "coincidences" tying Jack the Ripper to Walter Sickert, a famous British painter. She applies modern forensics, psychological profiling, and DNA sampling to once and for all resolve the identity of Whitechapel's infamous butcher.
Throughout the book, Cornwell's talents as a best-selling fiction writer are evident. Her descriptions of 19th century culture and forensic technology are extraordinarily vivid, with a rich, story-like detail throughout. Biographical sketches, the biting taunts of the Ripper letters, and eye-witness accounts are impressively presented and bring to life the circumstances surrounding the crimes. But little is offered that will supplant a host of other theories on the actual identity of Ripper. Cornwell's logic is faulty and at times self-contradicting. Oversights are common and alternative scenarios that point away from Sickert are either unmentioned or ignored. Contrary evidence is manipulated until it somehow points back to Sickert, and the validity of every point hinges on a profane number of conjectures and speculations, few of which are supported by a single scrap of evidence.
Patricia Cornwell's book left me very unimpressed. I have read all her Kay Scarpetta novels, and I don't remember feeling that they were full of holes and fluff, like I felt with this book.
Unfortunately, I feel that instead of doing the research first and making her conclusion based on that research, instead she came to her conclusion and built the research around it. Her psychological "profiling" seems completely fabricated. She takes quotes completely out of context. She refers to artwork and paintings of Sickert's that she doesn't include. The whole book seems like an essay that she had a word count to complete, and she's filling in with alot of fluff because she doesn't have enough meat or real evidence to make her case.As far as the much-ballyhooed DNA evidence, even that wouldn't hold up in court, much less the court of my armchair. Even if it conclusively proved that Sickert's DNA was on a letter that was signed "Jack the Ripper" that couldn't possibly prove that the letter writer was also the murderer.
I'm very disappointed in the book as I thought it would have a much more scholarly feel to it. Probably only dedicated collectors of all things Ripper will want to read this as it probably does, at the very least, bring a few new things to light.