Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Kindle Edition) by Patricia Cornwell

Where to start with this one. I bought the original hardback of the first release of this book and found it interesting a different take on the Jack The Ripper history. I remember being relieved to see that I wasn't the only one who thought the Canonical Five victims seemed a little bit odd for a killer who was so prolific over a relatively short period. Certainly the earlier possible victims make sense when taken in to the perceived escalation of a Serial Killer. I did, however, feel that the murders in other localities that bore a superficial resemblance to these killings were not perpetrated by the same person and the leaps within this text to make those correlations are not believable in the slightest. Also, the conclusions drawn about Walter Richard Sickert are spurious at best and I just cannot see what some claim to see as symbolism in his artworks that point the finger more firmly in his direction. I am aware that Ms Cornwell is not the first person to suggest Mr Sickert may have been Jack The Ripper but I still remain unconvinced that this particular theory has any more validity than many others.

The plus points of this book are the wealth of information shared from the archives of Scotland Yard, including photos of crime scenes and the victims that re less familiar. We have all seen photos of some of the letters and the mortuary photos of the victims but some of the ones in this book are new. Some of them are especially harrowing and depict the brutality of the murders in a monochrome finality that is somehow worse than if they had been in glorious technicolour.

This is a revised edition and their is a hefty section at the end devoted to Ms Cornwell telling us how hard the investigations were on her but how she felt that she was destined to carry out this investigation. There is also a fair bit time spent throughout the book and in the Afterword describing how much of her own money she has sunk in to this endeavour. Sorry, it was your decision to go down this route and don't expect me to feel sympathy for any real or perceived personal or financial losses as a result. There is little humility in the Afterword and some of the sections where she discusses others reactions to her work come across as quite derisory and belittling of others viewpoints.

I purchased this revision for 2 reasons, it was on offer and I wanted to see what the Kindle In Motion thingy was all about. Sadly my ancient Fire couldn't handle the technology, the reader for the PC couldn't handle it either and the app for the Android tablet froze about halfway through the book and refused to go past that point. Now I have a Fire 10 I decided to finish the book and it works smoothly on that as you imagine. However, Kindle In Motion provides nothing but bloat and little in the way of additional user experience, it takes so long to download from the Cloud to the Fire that mine actually went to sleep due to inactivity about 90% of the way through the download.

If you are going to purchase this book then I would strongly recommend steering clear of the e-Book version. On a standard reader the additional graphics do not run and the pictorial sections are too small and illegible to be of much use.

**Review originally published December 22nd, 2017**