“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” Incredibly, as the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in The Strand Magazine in the early 1890s, a real-life Canadian doctor was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighborhood. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream had been a suspect in the deaths of two women in Canada and had killed as many as four people in Chicago before he arrived in London in 1891 and began using pills laced with strychnine to kill prostitutes. The Lambeth Poisoner, as he was dubbed in the press, was one of the most prolific serial killers in history, a cold-blooded murderer who evaded detection in three countries in a killing spree to rival that of Jack the Ripper, his infamous contemporary.

Victorian Monster is the gripping true story of a murderous madman and reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt police and justice officials, failed prosecutions, and missed opportunities allowed him to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again. It is the first complete account of Cream’s crimes and his many victims, and explores how the stifling morality and hypocrisy of the times allowed him to poison vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help. It offers an inside account of Scotland Yard's desperate search for a killer as brazen and efficient as the Ripper. And it brings to life a story of murder and suspense, when evil lurked on the gas-lit streets of Chicago and London.