SOURCE: A review of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, p. 149.

In the following review, Hutchings offers a favorable assessment of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree.

With the detailed knowledge of Victorian London that was reflected in his biography of Charles Dickens, and with the ingeniousness of plot construction associated with his previous novels, Chatterton and Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd has written The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, an intriguing and meticulously detailed account of a series of brutal murders in the Limehouse district in 1880. It is in many ways a worthy successor of the Victorians’ own “novels of sensation,” but told with a twentieth-century sophistication in its narrative technique that presents multiple points of view. The lurid crimes, known as the Golem murders (named after a malevolent spirit of Jewish legend), are remarkable not only for the ability of the murderer seemingly to...