Hope everyone likes the changes. Thank you to Daria of Web-Divas for the time and patience in designing the new look.

I read Trevor Marriot's book, Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation yesterday. Although it's always good to get a perspective from someone with a law enforcement background, this book left me bored. Most of it is a rehash of the case and Marriot spends his time "relooking" at each victim's murder only to come up with conclusions that are generally accepted anyway. When talking about Frances Coles, Marriot writes that she told people before she died that a "gang" of men had attacked her; therefore, Marriot rules her out as a Ripper victim. Well, most people have done the same--what's new about this? Then Marriot uses eyewitness and medical testimony from the coroner's inquests to come up with a "pattern" that his suspect would fit. First, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable even hours after the event; second, medical testimony between doctors differed so greatly at the time that it's easy to make any one doctor's opinion fit your preconceived suspect. Even when Marriot gets to his suspect at the end, there is no real "suspect." Marriot falls back on the "could have been" or "was probably" type of evidence. He even admits at the end that he has no more idea about who Jack was than anyone else. This would be find except this was supposed to be a book that named a suspect and/or proved a case against a suspect. The publisher's notes carries the obligatory "case finally solved" rhetoric on the jacket, but this never happens. This book appears to have been "spread out" to appear longer and more detailed--it's also written very tersely, subject-verb-subject-verb over and over until it's maddening.
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