Book 56 - The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

Reading date - January 2021

I have been wanting to read this book since I first heard about it as I think it's very unfair when a man murders women, they always focus on the man and not on the victims.  A lot of the time this is done because society deems the victims as being worthless as they're not "respectable" woman, due to them working the streets at night (or day, I dunno how it works).  

I was in my last year at uni when the Suffolk Strangler struck and I was studying the law of evidence at the time.  I remember when it first all kicked off, we discussed it in class and I said it seems like this is a modern day version of Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper, in that there was a man out there who seemed to have something against women and was killing those he thought nobody would miss.  And what happened there? There was a man who had something against women and was killing those he thought nobody would miss.

Any review I write up on here is not going to be without a bit of social commentary thrown in because that's my style and that's how I like to read books (hence why Young Soul Rebels is one of my favourite books, tying together music, school and murders).

I finally got my hands on it in December of last year and it went into rotation.  Well, it started out good, full of detail, minute detail about victim 1.  Then it went through the other victims.  And I got bored by victim 3.  It was all much of the sameness.  The author may have done a lot of research on this book as she is a historian but I feel a lot of it was made up (e.g. the day to day bits) and presented as fact.  It was fascinating to know what life was like back there and that nearly all of the ladies fell on hard times and that some were alcoholics and some had resorted to thievery and prostitution.

It's the prostitution angle where I feel the book really falls apart.  The author goes to great lengths to point out that that not all the ladies who were killed were prostitutes but then each chapter has a heavy lean towards prostitution in it...well, every chapter bar the last one.

The book is split into five sections, one for each victim.  It is sad to read how their lives start out full of promise and hope and at each turn, the hopes are dashed and they eventually find themselves in the gutter, trying to scratch out a living.

I feel that this book wasn't what I was expecting in the way it was written but that could just be me.  The fact it presents conjecture as fact is a bit of an issue for me..as well as the author at the same time saying "we will never know".  Well, there are things in the book you've written as fact which aren't fact so how can you pick and choose which is which?  Don't embellish just the things that fit your narrative because that isn't unbiased and does the victims as much of a disservice as reports at the time did of just glossing over them.

In conclusion, it was alright.