The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer

Product Description
“A tour de force of storytelling.” —Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series\n“Jobb’s excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read.” —
The New York Times Book Review\n”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.\nStructured 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.\nDean 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.
Review
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021:The New York Times Book Review * BuzzFeed * CNN * CrimeReads * Book RiotOne of IndieWire's 10 Best Gifts for True Crime Fans One of The Washington Post's "50 Notable Works of Nonfiction" “Jobb recounts Cream’s life and evokes the societal attitudes that allowed him to kill: the blind faith placed in doctors, the power imbalance between Cream and the people who sought his care.” —The New York Times “A deeply absorbing account of the life and deeds of one of the Ripper’s earliest ‘successors’ . . . An admirable piece of work, a model for its kind.” —The Wall Street Journal “[Dr. Thomas Neill Cream] will hauntingly occupy a space in your nightmares after you read of his life and crimes in The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream. An extraordinarily well-researched and arrestingly written work . . . this is a book that grabs you from its first sentence, weaving a suspenseful tale and taking readers on a grand, if gruesome, historical journey.” —Chicago Tribune “Jobb . . . re-creates Cream’s heartless life in short, highly dramatic chapters.” —The Washington Post “If you've been hunting for your next true crime addiction this summer, Dean Jobb's The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream has it all: a serial-killer doctor, corrupt leaders, and a ground-breaking investigation by Scotland Yard, all within the spellbinding setting of London circa 1892.” —Elle “True crime fans will want to pick up Dean Jobb’s engrossing account of Thomas Neill Cream . . . Jobb builds Cream’s world in vivid, transportive detail; I had a lot of fun being swept away.” —BuzzFeed, “28 Summer Books to Get Excited About” “A must for true crime fans.” —CNN “A tour de force of storytelling. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Dean Jobb breathes new life into Cream's victims—who they were, where and how they lived—all the while blending in thorny issues of policing, of the fictional detectives being created, of the other serial killers on the loose. This book is both chilling and