I’ve been catching up on my LibraryThing earlyreviewer duties in the past few days with The Doctor from Hell, a book about the notorious Harold Shipman. Most people will know that this doctor was convicted in early 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs and is strongly suspected of having actually dispatched well over 200 patients throughout the course of his career.

Genoveva Ortiz’s book purports to give an accessibly written inside story on Shipman. The result is a monograph that runs to 66 pages in the PDF format I received it in. It doesn’t use the simplest possible language (for example, how about “dug up” rather than “exhumed”?) but a reader probably wouldn’t struggle if they could cope with the average tabloid newspaper.

I would prefer an approach that allows the language to be a little more finely crafted and, more critically, to bear a few footnotes, endnotes or appendices to back up the statements made. Was the unfortunate Kathleen Grundy really the first person exhumed (or dug up!) in the Greater Manchester area (p. 57)? It is a large city with a storied history and that is the kind of sweeping statement that makes me cautious about the many other assertions. Being Manchester, there is a high probability that the night it happened was both dark and rainy but that could equally have come from ‘Writing Clichés 101’. How do I know that I’m reading proper history and not the dressing up of fiction with a few real names? At the very least, a bibliography would be in order to indicate that some research has been done beyond reading Wikipedia and exercising the imagination. For reference, the Wikipedia article presently shows 79 references to a wide range of sources, although the fact they are mainly news media items from after Shipman’s conviction means that doesn’t represent an incredibly high standard in itself.

There is also an interesting although probably inadvertent philosophical question raised by the book. If Shipman truly deserves the moniker “the doctor from hell”, what then are we to make of the concluding sentence of the work: “At the end of the day, Harold Shipman was simply one of us”? I think I am probably not part of the natural target audience for this books or others in the series. However, although it does manage to achieve the aim of being easy reading, the lack of any attempt to demonstrate proper research means I would hesitate to recommend it to readers at any level.