I want to review this book for what it is; not for what it is next to the other books by Palahniuk. The narrator starts by telling how the book works, that it's not a normal book but it jumps back and forward in the timeline - just like a fashion magazine. And boy is that the truth. It never gets confusing but it adds to the complexity of the twists and turns. It also makes it more enjoyable for future reading (if one is interested in that, and without a doubt in my mind most will read it more than once). This is a very dark and gloomy book, even the humor is dark and gloomy. It's kind of hard to talk about the contents of the book without giving something vital away. After finishing it you realise that it is nothing like you expected. Not even as you are reading it, thanks to the many twists.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the case of "Jack the Ripper," since this book is amazingly to the point, and only facts (which is so rare). No things like "if that happened then that could have happened also..." blahblah, like way too many books are about on this subject.
Even though this book is fairly big - as in with many names and so on - I'd recommend it as a great starting point for someone who knows little or nothing at all about the case.
After covering possible victims (each in great detail), other than the 4-5 most likely, with great detail, it goes into the covering what effect the murders had on London at the time. Then goes into some of the most known suspects and shows what is known about them and how each might or might not have been "Jack," with only known facts. The only thing that he goes outside from the facts is when he gets a profiler to say what he believes "Jack" might have been like. It is an interesting read.
I also want to add that he corrects alot of small, yet relevant, details that were taken for granted but, as he proves, some "Ripperologists" got wrong.

Wow, this is so weird and - I'll hand her that - imaginative. If I will ever commit a crime I'd want her to prosecute me - that would make a jail-free card. She could as well have picked Queen Victoria or Oscar Wilde as prime suspects and added some novel-like speculations. She might have even had the real Jack the Ripper and messed things up by jumping to different conclusions that are irrelevant.

I won't go into the basics of this book since most of the other reviews have done that. What I'd like to add is how well the author balances and tangles the tragic and the humor together, which is rare to see done so well in modern literature. Also how the writing style seems minimalistic in many ways but then there come highly poetic parts out of nowhere, which makes the poetic parts so much better than when authors are trying to make every sentence into something poetical and it just gets boring. I also would like to add, for those of you who are interested, that you can (or atleast could) get a copy of the film from www.skifan.is, it's an Icelandic store. The film is great and Paul is portrayed brilliantly by the main actor. I just have a hard time wondering why the book/film didn't get more attention.