The Doctor from Hell: The True Story of Harold Shipman One of Britain's Most Prolific Serial Killer With an Estimated 218 Victims (True Crime Explicit Vol 7) by Genoveva Ortiz

This book was received from LibraryThing under the Early Reviewers program.
This non-fiction book is a mini biography that focuses on the serial killer Harold “Fred” Shipmen from the United Kingdom.
Book was written in a very simple format to appeal to all readers. It is a quick read and covers all the facts of his miserable treatment of his elder patients, especially older women.
The question that needs to be addressed is, Why didn’t anyone notice the unusually high numbers of his patient’s deaths? All his patients seemed to love this doctor, was it because he did house visits?
Dr. Shipmen was convicted of only 15 deaths, but it is thought that the total number was closer to 218 deaths between 1975 - 1998. I do not believe he would have gotten away with so many deaths in this age of the internet, social media, and computers.
This mini biography prompted me to purchase a full size book on this infamous serial killer who currently holds the record of most deaths by a single person.
• Interesting note: just finished two books by English authors where Dr. Shipmen mentioned in the storylines. ( )

3.5 stars

Harold Shipman was a doctor in the U.K. from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. In that time, he murdered over 200 people (likely the number is much higher). He is the serial killer who has killed the most people ever. This is a short biography of him and his deeds. He was actually very well-liked, but things came tumbling down with the death of another well-liked and influential woman in her community.

This is meant to be for any level reader, so it is kept short and simple. I still thought the story was good, but because it was kept short, there were plenty of details and victims that could have been expanded on. It’s not tale of blood and guts murder, but a doctor who (for reasons unknown) killed many of his own patients. ( )

This book tells you up front that it is meant to be in simple language to appeal to readers at all levels. I'm aware that I'm a very high level reader, but I'm also aware of how people speak and read at all levels. That's why I marked this book so low. The information is all basic, anything you'd get in an hour-long documentary but I found the language with which it was delivered to be frustrating. I could clearly see what the author was attempting, but in their tries to make it more understandable, I think they actually achieved the opposite. The overuse of extremely short sentences didn't make it easier to read, it made it more difficult. Here's a paragraph from early in the book, about why Shipman and his wife got married. I think tha treferring to how Primrose's relationship with her parents 'broke' when the first part of the sentence speaks of tension is an error of choice, as the reader's mind goes to the tension breaking, not the relationship breaking. It feels as if the author is mixing metaphors.

If Primrose’s relationship with her parents was tense before, it all but broke when the news of her pregnancy reached them. The scandalized Oxtobys demanded that Shipman, irrespective of their dislike of him, marry their daughter to make the situation right. The young couple did just that, having a small court ceremony on November 5, 1966, attended by none of their friends. Still, the damage was done. Primrose’s parents never forgave her

In my opinion it would be far easier to be read if it had been re-written like so:

Primrose's tense relationship with her parents only worsened when the news of her pregnancy reached them. Though they disliked Shipman, the scandalized Oxtobys demanded that he make it right by marrying their daughter. The young couple complied and had a small court ceremony on November 5, 1966. None of their friends attended. Neither did it win Primrose any favour as her parents never forgave her.

Ultimately, I found that to be the book's downfall. It was a little too child-like in its execution, despite it very clearly being for a reader old enough to handle the content. The phrasing also seemed to be based around trying to keep the language simple, but ended up creating a more difficult syntax.
( )

A very readable, short biography of Harold Shipman. I knew nothing on this topic prior to reading the book, but now have a good grasp of the man. At first I thought he was a "mercy killer" as many of his early victims were terminally ill or seemed to be living in severe pain, but his murders soon progressed beyond this. The author does a decent job of giving an overview of Shipman's life Which could easily fill a 500 page tome. The author gives few details, but at ties does delve a bit deeper into the lives of victims or Shipman's activities, but usually only mentions a series of names of victims, not really telling how they were killed or why. The author admits to having difficulty analyzing the whys and wherefores of Shipman's actions, and I do not know that there is an answer, other than the one buried with Shipman. But a highly readable concise, enjoyable volume. I would often set out to read a chapter an find myself reading two or three instead. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in serial killers or true crime stories.

Genoveva Ortiz’s book purports to give an accessibly written version of the inside story on Harold 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. ( )