Rating: 
Summary: Unlike other reviwers, I found this book fascinating!
Review: After reading this book, I am convinced that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. I found her book fascinating and hard to put down. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Little Substance, Much Inuendo
Review: Cornwell presents absolutely no facts for her case. Moreover, she reveals an overall lack of knowledge about the case; not suprising since before she started the book she admitted she knew hardly anything about the Ripper murders. Instead of presenting facts, Cornwell shamelessly maligns a great artist with her blind, baseless assumptions. At best, she might have a case for Sickert having written a few hoax letters, but there were thousands of such hoax letters and absolutely none of them have ever been successfully tied to the killer. I think Cornwell should stick to writing fiction, for she certainly is no journalist and doesn't seem to understand the difference between investigative reporting and stroy telling.
Rating: 
Summary: Portrait of an idiot!
Review: I really have enjoyed nearly all of Cornwell's fiction. I have admired the versimilitude of her work and respected her as a former coroner in Virginia. I have even enjoyed some of her non-fiction as well--"Recipes to Die For" is a hoot and I have enjoyed using her mandatory literary cookbook. Portrait of a Killer, on the other hand, is a sad effort. If you enjoy sophistries, non sequitors, logical fallacies, and a myriad of assorted inanities then this is the book for you. I found this one of the most annoying books I have ever read. She spent a lot of money producing this book and seems to have gotten caught up in the process. Poor Walter Sickert and his descendents! I hope that the family successfully sues Cornwell. One piece of advice: Don't Bother!
Rating: 
Summary: Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick!?!?!?
Review: Let's face it there are more Ripper suspects then there were probable Ripper victims. This is just going to have to be one of those cases that will never be solved with a true degree of certainty at this late date. With that said I suppose Ms Cornwell's suspect could have as easily been Jack the Ripper as any of the others. I would not recommend this book if you are going to be overly critical of it. Although I must admit that I am not sold on Sickert being Jack, it was still interesting to read the case that Ms. Cornwell put together. Her case is based on circumstancial evidence, but lets face it, at this point in time that is about all that is left. Don't expect to come away with the case solved. This is just one take on a very interesting and much talked about case.
Rating:
Summary: Case not closed for me...
Review: I was so excited about getting this book after seeing Patricia Cornwell interviews, articles about the book, and reading a couple of excerpts from it. Generally I don't read non-fiction, but I felt that I would try the genre. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Case Closed? Not really. At least not for me. It took me a lot longer to finish this book then it does most the ones that I read. There was no sense of organization to the book. It jumped around so much that I was easily confused. It was like Cornwell just started writing and when she remembered a detail, she stuck it in.
After spending millions of dollars of her own money and writing a book, I expected the case against Walter Sickert to be airtight. But it wasn't. At the end of the book I was still asking myself who had really done it. While there are a few things to connect Sickert to the crime, there are a lot of things that just don't pan out. I just think there are too many "possibilities" that will sadly never be proven and seem a little far-fetched.
Now I did get a lot of information and learn things that I otherwise would not have known. But as a whole I felt gypped into reading a book that promised something that it wasn't. There were no shocking revelations or airtight cases. And for that, I gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Appallingly poor piece of work
Review: I find it hard to believe that this book was even published, or that the editors actually permitted it to go to press in this disordered, rambling, repetitive mess of words. The writing is so poor that I was appalled. Cornwell may be able to crank out some detective fiction, but she is certainly completely deficient when it comes to putting together an argument concerning a topic of non-fiction. A publication attempting to implicate a person in crimes as horrific as those of Jack the Ripper should not only resemble a more scholarly work, but should be written by someone capable of presenting the case in a straightforward and intelligent manner, without dramatic embellishments or overtly self-conscious opinions as Cornwell does.
While subject of Jack the Ripper is an interesting one and may keep you barely hanging on to this book, Cornwell's assumptions and misjudgments about the "evidence" will leave you hunting for information from different, more reliable sources. Her connections are shaky at best, and her writing form and organization (or lack thereof) destroy any hope she might have had at convincing anyone of Walter Sickert's guilt. This is unfortunate, for it may be possible that Sickert might have been the Ripper.
In the end, the self-indulgent "Case Closed" title is laughable.
Jack the Ripper himself must be "Ha ha"-ing in his grave.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: What could have been a fascinating topic and analysis of evidence turned out to be a poorly organized and awkwardly written account of the author's attempt to "expose" Jack the Ripper. The book is difficult to read because of the way the author jumps around from idea to idea.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed
Review: While I don't disagree with Cornwell's assessment that Walter Sickert could have been Jack the Ripper, I found the book a very disappointing read. From her Scarpetta novels, I expected a tightly wrapped story. Instead I felt she was all over the place -- her personal struggle with the material, as ourlined in her conversation with her editor in the 1st chapter, added nothing to the story in my opinion. Her constant harping on what would be done today in an investigation did not add to the original thesis of the book -- to prove that Sickert was the killer -- and was distracting. Her laundry list of unsolved murders post 1888 was reptetitive and redudant.
Rating:
Summary: not even an interesting theory
Review: I was really looking forward to reading Portrait of a Killer, I've been interested in Jack the Ripper since a trip to England and read some other works about him, mostly just this-is-what-happened casebooks. But this book was awful. The author blatently states that "Ripperology" is just something she picked up one day and decided to write a book on, and she didn't seem to to a very good job getting her research on the cases and the theory she has. After reading the speculations of Ripperologists, much more creative, I found her speculations boring, and it was the same old thing over and over again for pages, just "look at the watermarks! Look at his pictures!" This was the only real evidence the author had. This book was very boring. If you want a good read on Jack the Ripper try Donald Rumbelow's The Complete Jack the Ripper, it's a much better read and better written as well. Save your money on this one.
Rating:
Summary: A "Circumstantial" account of Jack The Ripper
Review: At first, I was excited to read this account because I have been such a fan of the case. However, upon conclusion of the last page, I was still asking the question, "Who Dunnit?" As a few other reviewers have already noted, Ms. Cornwell bombards the reader with a more circumstantial "evidence" like similar handwriting and watermarks used by Sickert, and an overabundance of verbiage. The closest she comes to any type of proof is a few traces of mitochondrial DNA on an envelope which does not even lead back to Sickert himself. She seems to spend most of her time with quotes such as "Sickert most likely was here..." or "Chances are Walter Sickert used the same...". It appears she felt more of a need to prove to us her knowledge of foresnics rather than prove the case.
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