Kate Scarth

So The Five by Hayley Rubenhold.

And this is the story of Jack the Ripper's five canonical victims.

So the five victims that they're pretty sure were all murdered by the person called Jack the Ripper.

And this book is amazing for a few reasons.

It's nonfiction.

And Rubenhold is not interested at all, really, in Jack the Ripper and what the identity of that person is, which there's, you know, there's a lot of speculation and titillation around the identity of that murder.

So Haley Rubenhold is recuperating the names, the stories, the lives of the women who were Jack the Ripper's victims and really

you know honoring them as human beings and and and putting their their lives in the context of of late 19th century london um so it's just learning about these women in and of themselves is like it's so powerful and again another thing i love about this book is that we did get such a sense of the research that ruben hall did and how you know the lives of working-class women

who were often illiterate, is not hard to piece together.

But Ruben Hall does it.

She goes into like workhouse, poorhouse archives.

And like, it's such an honoring of these people whose lives have been dismissed, really.

Yes.

So I think that these are stories about women's lives, women's lives in the past.

They're stories that all have kind of an investigator character who's narrating them.

Even if Hayley Rubenhold's not a character in her book, like you do get just such a powerful sense of her research.

So I think that that part really, I find really compelling.

You can kind of see that act of creation happening on the page.

I think the honoring of people's lives, people who, well, I guess in all of them, there's, I didn't really think about this until right now, there's murder happening in all of these.

I do like detective mystery novels.