"To some merchandisers, they are no longer human beings, but cartoon figures whose bloody images can be printed onto T-shirts, whose deaths can be laughed about on postcards and whose entrails decorate stickers. Is it any wonder that there has been no public appetite to examine the lives of the canonical five, when they have never seemed real or of any consequence to us before?"

A brilliant account about the lives of the five women who were brutally murdered in the late 1880s. Rubenhold has given these women back their identity, history and their dignity. A must read.