2007 hardcover with dust jacket and 646 pages in good condition.

Award-winning South African historian Van Onselen has crafted a riveting narrative portraying the life and crimes of Joseph Silver (1868 -1918), a violent man whose story is almost too improbable to be true. Silver terrorized women on four continents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising from humble Jewish roots in a small Polish town to become a leading trafficker in female slaves. With masterful survival instincts, Silver locked horns with the forces of law and order in England, the U.S., South Africa and Argentina, often corrupting those who pursued him and even, in a jaw-dropping display of chutzpah, serving on occasion as a police officer himself. Despite the overall fascination with Silver, Van Onselen's excellent book will receive more notice for its final chapter, in which he makes a compelling circumstantial case for Silver being Jack the Ripper. While the evidence is somewhat more speculative than the author concedes, he deserves credit for identifying a man with a history of violence against women who apparently lived in the heart of Whitechapel during the 1888 Autumn of Terror, and who matched some eyewitness descriptions of suspicious figures seen with the victims shortly before their deaths.