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The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer
by Dean Jobb
"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.
Structured 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.
Dean 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 a master of the genre.
"Jobb provides the definitive account of serial poisoner Thomas Neill Cream in this enthralling real-life thriller...extensive research pays off in a true-crime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream...A vivid, engaging revival of a forgotten Victorian villain." - Kirkus Reviews
"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
"A brilliant evocation of an age and a fascinating dissection of a serial killer's crimes. Dean Jobb is a first-rate storyteller and historical detective. A real page-turner." - Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
"Corruption, madness, murder: Dr. Cream has it all. This is a spectacular and absorbing tale, meticulously reported and vividly told. An enthralling page-turner." - Jonathan Eig, author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster
"The definitive retelling of a story about a devious doctor, the dogged investigators who hunted him, and the murders that shocked the world. Dr. Cream's story comes to life in Jobb's spellbinding tale." - Kate Winkler Dawson, author of American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI
This information about The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dean Jobb is the author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, winner of the inaugural CrimeCon Clue Award for true crime book of the year and longlisted for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His previous books include Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called "intoxicating and impressively researched" and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Esquire magazine has hailed him as "a master of narrative nonfiction." Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and Toronto's Globe and Mail and his monthly true crime column, "Stranger Than Fiction," appears in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He is a professor at the University of King's ...
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