Short, disappointing, doesn't really go anywhere. It's only 155 pages but is nevertheless heavily padded out. If we're being generous, there's only 100 pages on the torso murders in here with the rest dedicated to irrelevant summaries of unrelated cases in different eras which do nothing to illuminate the supposed subject of the book.

There's a chapter summarising Jack the Ripper, a chapter listing various known lunatics of the time who couldn't have been the torso killer, a chapter of pure speculation which is rapidly presented as fact about a "cats meat man" suspect who cannot even be shown to have existed.

The writing style is dull which makes the occasional out of place humorous asides and sudden ironic exclamation marks when the author thinks he has hit upon a wry observation all the more jarring. I didn't get anything out of this to make it a keeper. ( )

An interesting insight into a true crime I didn't know about before. As enlightening on the late Victorian era as on the subject matter. ( )

This is an excellent book and tells everything that we can now know about the man who, over 100 years ago, murdered and dismembered several women and dumped their body parts in the Thames. Many of his victims, like the killer himself, remain unidentified and the case is all but forgotten today except as a footnote to the Jack the Ripper case, since the Ripper and the Torso Killer were operating in London at the same time.

A word of warning: M.J. Trow spends much of the book NOT talking about the Torso Killer. He discusses other cases (Jack the Ripper, the Green River Killer, the unsolved "Jack the Stripper" murders in the 1960s, etc.), and compares them to the Torso Killer's crimes. I thought this was a good idea. Other readers may find it annoying.

Trow winds up making some postulations about the Torso Killer that make a lot of sense, and some of them are very specific. For example, he believes the killer was a horse slaughterer and/or butcher and thinks he's identified the place where the killer worked (in both the "working for money" sense and in the "killing" sense, since Trow thinks he did the killing and dismemberment at his place of employment), and therefore his employer. There are no lists left of employees from that time and place, so Trow doesn't go so far as to provide any provide any potential names, and he's careful to emphasize that this is just his IDEA, his THEORY, and none of the notions in his theory need be considered to be a fact. But I've never seen a person writing about historical unsolved crimes go so far as to suggest where the killer worked.

I really liked the book actually, thought it was well-written and well-researched. It's not for everybody, but I think fans of historical true crime will like it. Jack the Ripper hobbyists in particular might enjoy it. ( )