SOURCE: "In the Service of Empire," in Book World The Washington Post, Vol. XXI, No. 17, April 28, 1991.

In the following review, Clute gives a negative assessment of The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, claiming that it is weighed down by too much verbalizing and too little urgency on the part of the characters.

Jack the Ripper is a bit like the Boojum. Like that most invisible and most threatening of all the varieties of Snark in Lewis Carroll's famous poem, he lurks blank and ravenous at the end of the hunt, and it is an unlucky Bellman who runs across his likeness in the flesh. The most famous murderer in the world, he remains unexposed, a phantom of the London fog, and it may be just as well that the many writers who continue to search for his true identity will, almost certainly, never prove that they...