Jack of all Trades: The Untold Lives of Jack the Ripper
This is an unusual book. I'll say that from the outset. It's a pigtail pull, a wedgie, chock full o' purple nurple prose. This book is a tease, a tug, an inkblot flicked from a ruler. It's having a pop. What this book isn't is about Jack the Ripper. I mean, he's in it , or she's in it. Their bloody wake through the autumn of 1888 is revealed in pitiless, forensic detail. The same few events pored over again and again, examined from every angle, each bare fact given a dozen different interpretations, prompting diverse motivations. But really, its a book about Jack's legacy: not serial-killers but serial-killer detectives, positing their convoluted, tortuously argued suspects, whose only qualifications appear to be being alive at the time of the crimes. (Though this book goes one better - one of the suspects was not actually born until long after Mary Kelly breathed her last). Beyond that, anything goes: royalty, midwifery, eminent surgeons, coach driver...
