Rating: 
Summary: Huge Disappointment
Review: This book is garbage. Cornwell labels Strickert,who is obviously dead and not able to defend himself, a serial killer. She ought to be ashamed of herself. Cornwell's book is called "case closed." What a joke. You could never get a conviction in court on the evidence she presents. Furthermore, she's a boring writer. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Please stop and think before you criticise
Review: Cornwell proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Walter Sickert was obsessed with the Ripper case and wrote numerous letters claiming to BE Jack the Ripper. Letters written by Sickert and the self-described Ripper did not merely share watermarks - they came from the same batch of 24 sheets, and their stamps and flaps share DNA! If this letter-writer was a prankster, how did he manage to predict far-off locations and details of near-future crimes? Cornwell had no desire to frame Sickert; a couple of years ago she knew virtually nothing about either Sickert or the Ripper. Cornwell has won over the world's foremost Sickert expert. The head of Scotland Yard says that he would arrest Sickert on Cornwell's evidence. But no, all these amateurs know better! The hysterical reaction to Cornwell's well-proven case reminds me of the reaction to Fawn Brodie's assertion that Thomas Jefferson had children by Sally Hemings. Everyone attacked her. It's just sexism and a refusal to let go of preconceived notions. Eventually, Cornwell's will be the received opinion. The truth is the daughter of time. The book, by the way, is riveting.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Slated Book in The History of Modern Literature
Review: Nowhere in recent memory has a book been panned so much as Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper. In fact it will probably go down in history as the most read wacky attempt at complete and utter mind-shattering skullduggery ever committed to the page. Not only has Cornwell just invented a new GENRE (Crime Faction) she has shocked art appreciators worldwide (she destroyed a Sickert paining in her research and yet she now claims to be a leading Sickert expert because she has spent time on a tiny fragment of the artist's huge volume of work) and probably done nothing more than zip a population back to the old days of the White Chapel murder myths. Now there is nothing wrong with Cornwell coming up with her own theory, Hundreds of writers have done it, so why does Cornwell get singled out? In fact Stephen Knight's 1976 book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution and Jean Overton Fuller's 1990 book, Sickert & The Ripper Crimes, both allude to Walter Sickert, the painter, as being Jack the Ripper. The answer lies in the numerous ways that her theory is presented, what she had done to get there and more importantly - how she treats the reader by pressing them with statements every other paragraph that read "Can't you see, he is Jack the Ripper!" First of all, one must look at the development of Ripper suspects. Between the years of 1888 and 1993 it was an absolute FREE FOR ALL. No one had done a thorough modern investigation into the case and so many myths where exploited by anyone who cared to do so. That is until 1994 when Philip Sugden wrote - "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper". Sugden's work is highly held in the greatest esteem because it did the following. (1) Sugden meticulously researched everything from the ground up and included a full bibliography with references to police files that could be accessed by the public. (2) He kept everything factual, real and did not deviate into speculation and theory. Sugden's work is the reason why books written by Ripper charlatans came to an end and only a handful of new works have since emerged. Cornwell must have missed out on Sugden somewhere. Now if you are a new Ripperologist who is just starting out in the field then maybe you could be forgiven for not getting up to date with Sugden's revision of the entire case - but if you are a Ripper writer, and you have not yet covered Sugden, well not a lot is going to be said for you unless you repeated his type of research from start to finish. I am not going to list all the problems with her theory - based on a Ripper letter that was never seriously considered to be ripper letter in the first place, even though the investigators at the time believed the letters to be a hoax, all 200 + of them, that have passed through many hands, for over 100 years, that she extracts DNA from, but only uses a mtDNA test that limits the DNA owner to 10% of the population! - nor will I go into the fact that she never proves Sickert was in London at the time of the killings, when there is evidence to suggest that he was in France, and killed prostitutes because he had a deformed penis and could not perform, even though he has heirs that exist today, and no evidence has ever been found that his penis was deformed - nor will I go into the little artifacts of his phrases and scribbles that match up with some alleged Ripper memorabilia, that seem more like chance occurrences or that fact that this is just an attempt to frame a suspect well before any research was undertaken. No I won't - What I really want to address in this review is the problem of a failed expensive investigations in that is need of a copout. What has happened here is that Cornwell did not bite the bullet. Ripperologists have always been intrigued about DNA testing and the Ripper case. Cornwell has proven that DNA can be extracted from Ripper artifacts that are over 100 years old. This is unique!.... but costs a bomb to do. Now if Cornwell had written a book about that then maybe she would have saved face, but certainly not her money. In many ways this is a very sad book for Cornwell. I see it more of a study of a writer who can not face the reality of what is obviously a very expensive expedition to prove that DNA can be lifted from Ripper artifacts. It is obvious that the writer and publisher are probably in a desperate bid to try and redeem the costs of what is probably THE MOST EXPENSIVE BOOK EVER WRITTEN. Come on? Do you really believe that Cornwell, a big name crime fiction writer, has solved the biggest crime mystery of our time?!!! She hyped this project to no end. She hyped it for well over a year. She spent millions of her own money behind the marketing campaign and evidence gathering. All the eggs where in the basket before the book was written. It was either a book about "I found DNA on Ripper merchandise" or a book about "I found DNA on Ripper merchandise... and discovered the Killer - Case Closed." I seriously doubt that Cornwell believes that Sickert is Jack the Ripper. If this book did that then the Editor would have not tried so hard to make this book so disjointed and presented in such a disorganized manner. This is not a book about Jack the Ripper. It is not even a book about Water Sickert. It is a book about the world of HIGH CONCEPT publishing, EXPENSIVE research, FAILED product delivery and trying to SAVE a reputation. And for that reason alone it is an absolute MUST READ!!!! ...
Rating: 
Summary: If she said so ...
Review: I just don't believe what I read in this book, first of all let me tell you that this book could be written in 50 pages, all the stories around the main story are boring and boring, and she compares what would happened if Jack the Ripper were alive in these days, how would you know that? When you write a story that really happened you don't compare what would happened if that story would be in our days.
I wrote a book of the story of Cleopatra and I wrote my novel in the Antarctica, but I never made any comparison if Cleopatra were alive today, you just can't do that.
I put 2 stars to this book because I just can't put one star to a book.
But at the end you really think that Patricia Cornwell knows who was Jack the Ripper?
Rating:
Summary: Mmmm, I don't think the case is closed
Review: I've always had people tell me I needed to read some Patricia Cornwell. I've always been interested in Jack the Ripper so I thought I'd check this book out and see what she was all about. Apparently she's all about being self-indulgent and writing too many chapters which are basically her restating her already shaky evidence. This Sickert guy is an interesting guy to read about and, hell, he might actually be the guy, but it will take a whole lot more than the circumstantial and non-evidence Cornwell provides in this book. Going by what she writes, the only thing I'm positive about concerning Sickert is that he was a snooty guy who didn't treat his wife too fondly. Cornwell gets way too wordy and the book is just really repetitive as a lot of the same things get repeated over and over. Plus, she constantly reminds us about the handicaps that the police at the time were dealing with, but I'm sure they were not so inept that they didn't look at things like the watermark she is so fond of talking about. Check it out if you're a Cornwell fan or a Jack the Ripper nerd, but just don't expect too much.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly written
Review: The book was useful in educating me about the Jack the Ripper case, about which I knew almost nothing. However, the book is poorly constructed and confusing. The author may have a persuasive argument that the English painter Walter Sickert committed the crimes, but the book is so disorganized that it is difficult to determine. The endless reminders (one would have been sufficient) that police agencies in 1888 had virtually no forensic capabilies (and then to list what they couldn't do) are tedious.
Rating:
Summary: Garbage
Review: An arrogant, self-serving piece of garbage. Ms. Cornwell's arguments are self-referential. At the start of her book, for example, she claims that Sickert's three operations on his penis left him unable to perform sexually (though she later points out that she cannot possibly know any details about the results of the operations, because no records remain on that issue). Later, she takes her own specious "facts" as the basis for claims that Sickert's impotence was a source of his murderous rage. This book abounds with this sort of slapdash "research" and so rather than write an essay here, I will disagree with a previous reviewer who said "Don't waste your time." It is never a waste of time to examine a sterling example of a category, even if that category is "Poorly Written Tripe." Just get it from the library so you won't be adding to her highly publicized millions (How did she get so rich!?!? I have never even heard of her until this book came out!) She will just use them to write another painful book.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't close this case just yet.
Review: If there is one theory about the identity of Jack the Ripper there are probably a hundred. Thanks to Patricia Cornwell there are now a hundred and one. Unfortunately, the case does not appear to me to be quite as closed, as the title would suggest. Cornwell simply makes too many assumptions and there is no real proof of her theory. Much too often there are lines such as there is no proof that her "killer" was in London at the time of a murder, but there is no proof that he wasn't. The "killer" the author names is the artist Walter Sickert. She offers as her first piece of evidence that Sickert was born with a genital defect and that the three operations to fix the problem may have left him deformed and unable to have sex. That of course led him to hate women. Freud would have been proud of Cornwell. She alleges that it is possible that he never consummated his marriages. However, since he was married three times it seems impossible that such a thing would not have come out. He was also accused of adultery in his divorce from his first wife and was said to have fathered a child by a mistress in France. Cornwell's theory is possible, but it seems a little farfetched. Cornwell's evidence concerning some of the Ripper letters is far more convincing. The same DNA shows up on stamps from one of Sickert's as is found on two Ripper letters. The Ripper letters being notes someone sent to the authorities and the press claiming to be the Ripper. She does a good job of showing that Sickert was probably the author of some of these letters. However, the police at the time didn't consider these letters to be genuine and they can't have been as dense as the author would have us believe. Given Sickert's personality, which Cornwell deals with extensively, it seems obvious that Sickert would have thought it great fun to make up these letters so he could be a part of the story. As for the details he knew he seems to have been fascinated by these murders and could likely have found out most all of his information from the police. Finally, Cornwell argues that Sickert's art gives him away. It is true that some of his art is disturbing but given his fixation on the Ripper case it is not at all unreasonable to expect to find some similarities to the Whitechapel murder scenes in his art. He was also fixated on World War I and hung around hospitals drawing the dead and dying though I doubt he was responsible for the war. The author also makes much of a painting Sickert did of his own bedroom which he called, "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom". The problem is that Sickert probably rented the room in the first place because the landlady was convinced that Jack the Ripper had once lived there. Cornwell may have indeed named the real killer, but I doubt it. There are just too many unanswered questions. She has however, added another name to the list of possible suspects and has done an enormous amount of research. Research which may end up helping name the real killer, if he is indeed ever found out. One will most assuredly find information here that will not be found in other books on the subject. Being a novelist, Cornwell has also turned out a very readable book and I enjoyed it very much. I just don't think she has solved the crime.
Rating:
Summary: No case at all
Review: Ms Cornwell starts the book by calling Walter Sickert a murderer, and continues the theme throughout. Unfortunately, she fails utterly to provide any evidence at all of his involvment in the Ripper murders, or any other murder for that matter. Stridency and repetition do not constitute proof. What most shocked me about the book was what was missing from it. A key point of her theory about Walter Sickert was his apparent impotence. Ms. Cornwell fails anywhere in the book to mention a certain Joseph Sickert, who maintains to this day to be Walter's illegitimate son. A bit of a hole in her theory that needs to be addressed. Either she was unaware of his existence (unlikely as she discusses the Dr. Gull/Masonic conspiracy, which was published in 1976 by Stephen Knight, who is also not mentioned in the book or bibilography, and which was based on allegations made by Joseph Sickert) or she made a deliberate decision to not mention him. The one case indicates an appalling lack of basic research, which casts doubt over the rest of her assertions; the second indicates either an inability to refute his claim or a cowardly refusal to challenge someone who is alive and able to file the defamation suit that Walter Sickert can't. Ms. Cornwell also fails to credit, or even mention, Jean Overton Fuller, who nominated Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper in 1990 based on exactly the same artistic grounds that Cornwell uses. Ms. Cornwell states that she can't prove Sickert was in London in Sept 1888, but can find no proof he wasn't. Again, she must not have looked very hard. Sickert was on his usual summer vacation with his family in France in Sept, proved by letters from his mother, his wife, and Jacques Emile Blanche. This should be particularly embarassing for Cornwell as she quotes from Blanche heavily throughout the rest of the book. I am not a Ripper expert. All of the above information I was able to find on the Internet in a matter of a hour or so. The book has been called poorly edited by other reviewers. I suspect that the editing style is deliberate; to hide the complete lack of any sustance to her allegations.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting theory
Review: Unfortunately I get the impression that this book wasn't written by one person only. It looks like a poor compilation of modular, sub-contracted research work, which hasn't been reviewed in its entirety before going to print. Example: It is assumed that one is familiar with the background of individuals in the story - although this individual's background is explained hundreds of pages later. Or another example: There is repetitive insistence how a murder investigation would be handled today. It seems that the various teams involved in writing didn't interact very much. Patricial Cornwell might have a point with Walter Sickert's involvement. But such an accusation should be her conclusion after reviewing all of the facts at the end of an investigation. Instead, the accusation of Walter Sickert is the very building block of her book in the first chapter. This leaves both the authoring team and the reader in a dead-end trap of either trusting a non-professional investigator or not. Read this book only if you feel you want to read yet another theory about the Ripper case. The sub-title ("Case Closed") is plain wrong/misleading and seems to serve the only purpose of increasing the sales.
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