Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell

She discusses probable additional victims, yet doesn't bother to provide any kind of comprehensive, dated timeline or chronology for the reader to refer to.

In addition, maddening and irrelevant asides are thrown in between the important points she is apparently trying to make.

Cornwell jumps around, not necessarily discussing events in chronological order. Many of the important primary documents would have been more convincing and much easier to see if they had been carefully and professionally photographed. The fake, grainy, sepia-tone illustrations lost a great deal of important detail seemingly for the sake of uniformity and artsy design. The book reads as if Cornwell took all of her voluminous research notes, taped all her little sticky notes together, and just typed it up using some kind of stream-of-consciousness technique known only to her. It appears as if not one word was edited out of this ridiculous, plodding tome that could have been one third its current size. This is a poorly written, disorganized, and disappointing book. Her unavoidable conclusion: Jack the Ripper was none other than a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world's finest museums.īy the time I finished this book, I almost felt like slitting my own throat! Enlisting the help of forensic experts, Cornwell examines all the physical evidence available: thousands of documents and reports, fingerprints, crime-scene photographs, original etchings and paintings, items of clothing, artists' paraphernalia, and traces of DNA.

With the masterful intuition into the criminal mind that has informed her novels, Cornwell digs deeper into the case than any detective before her-and reveals the true identity of this elusive madman.

In this headline-making new work of nonfiction, Cornwell turns her trademark skills for meticulous research and scientific expertise on one of the most chilling cases of serial murder in the history of crime-the slayings of Jack the Ripper that terrorized 1880s London. The number-one New York Times -bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell is known the world over for her brilliant storytelling, the courage of her characters, and the state-of-the-art forensic methods they employ.

Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell