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Summary
Summary
A #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller.
From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert , a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world's most chilling cases of serial murder--and the police force that failed to solve it.
Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art--as well as extensive evidence--points to another name, one that's left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material--including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause--and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.
Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed , this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.
Note: This book contains images that some readers may find disturbing.
Author Notes
Patricia Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida on June 9, 1956. When she was nine years old, her mother tried to give her and her two brothers to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife to care for. For a while the children lived with missionaries since their mother was unable to care for them.
After graduating from Davidson College in 1979, she worked for The Charlotte Observer eventually covering the police beat and winning an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte. Her award-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, A Time for Remembering, was published in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, she worked as a technical writer and a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. While working for the medical examiner, she began to write novels. Although the award-winning novel Postmortem was initially rejected by seven different publishers, once it was published in 1990 it became the only novel ever to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure, in one year.
She is the author of the Kay Scarpetta series, the Andy Brazil series, and the Winston Garano series. She has also written two cookbooks entitled Scarpetta's Winter Table and Food to Die For; a children's book entitled Life's Little Fable; and non-fiction works like Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this follow-up to 2002's Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Cornwell doggedly clings to her accusation that the legendary serial killer was painter Walter Sickert, though she concedes that her original case was overstated. However, in this account she does little to remedy the holes left in the last. Cornwell still imputes significance to facts of dubious relevance-for example, she links the uncommon use of "ha ha" in Ripper's letters to Sickert through his friendship with James McNeill Whistler, who was known for saying "ha ha." Her account jumps around chronologically, which makes ill-suited to readers who are unfamiliar with the case. She includes a section responding to critics of her prior book, as well as a litany of bizarre occurrences that she attributes to the Ripper's lingering psychic presence ("From the first moment I began this work, I sensed an entity, a terrifically negative energy that when invoked causes strange aberrations of physics"). At one point, she oddly claims that she chose not to interview a previous author who'd suspected Sickert, though that writer had died 16 years before she began her quest. Even readers willing to put her idiosyncrasies aside will find that after so much time and effort, Cornwell still fails to present convincing proof of her theory. Color illus. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.