The Five

Rubenhold's deliberate provocation is right there in her framing: rather than write another Jack the Ripper book focused on the killer or the crime scenes, she reconstructs the lives of his five known victims before their deaths, and argues forcefully that the long-standing assumption they were all sex workers is itself an unexamined slander. That argument made the book more contested than a typical popular history, but critics broadly praised the underlying achievement, which is restoring ordinary, specific biographies to women who existed in the public record mainly as murder statistics. The prose reads novelistically, which drew some criticism given the thin primary-source record, but the reframing itself was widely recognized as overdue.