"A tour de force of storytelling." --Louise Penny, #1 New York
Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series
**"Jobb's excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read."
--**The New York Times Book Review
"When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals," Sherlock
Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has
nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas
Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States,
Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was
his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as
brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.
Structured around the doctor's London murder trial in 1892, when he was
finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream
exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the
flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and
stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on
vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for
medical help.
Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland
Yard traces Dr. Cream's life through Canada and Chicago and finally to
London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming
into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science
to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that
serial killers existed--the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune
wrote, Dr. Cream's crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer:
one who operated without motive or remorse, who "murdered simply for the
sake of murder." For fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White
City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder,
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime
story from a master of the genre.
