I grew up in the 1960s and fondly remember the old black and white TV shows of The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness. So when I saw this book available via NetGalley I made a request for an ARC and was pleased to receive permission to read. The following is my own unbiased review.

American Demon is the story of Eliot Ness' appointment as Safety Director for the Cleveland Police Department following his years of service in Chicago where he and his collection of "untouchables" helped to bring down the Al Capone empire. Ness took the Cleveland position after being rebuffed to join the FBI by Director J. Edgar Hoover who was jealous of the publicity Ness received in Chicago and was committed to keeping Ness out of the FBI.

Cleveland needed help in the 1930s due to what we would today call a serial killer, but in those days was referred to as the "torso" killer because the victims were dismembered and their body parts were separated and dumped in various locations--including Lake Cayauga. Police detectives and the coroner were very limited in the clues they had available as the number of torsos began to pile up. American Demon is largely the story of Ness' arrival in Cleveland and his own efforts to find the killer (labeled as The Mad Butcher), many victims whose remains were found in an area known as Kingsbury Run.

The narrative is interesting as the timeline rolls forward and the many attempts to find who was responsible for the murders of so many people who were never identified properly, likely because they were homeless or transients. The savagery depicted in the story by the murders may be a bit disturbing for some readers. Ness encountered many obstacles from the Police Department, politicians, and others which made his task all the more difficult.

Ness also created his own problems. He was a heavy drinker, was married three times, and by the time of his death of a heart attack in his early 50s was nearly destitute. It really is a sad story, and the Ness in real life was nothing like the Ness character in the old TV series.

Having lived in Ohio (GO BUCKS) years ago I was interested in reading this book. The book is interesting, but at times my attention waned as the body count kept piling up (along with the politics) and efforts to identify the killer failed. The book is well-researched and the writing is clear. If you have an interest in the topic give it a try, but you may end up a bit disappointed as I did that one of your TV heroes was nothing like the real person.

I give this book three stars. My thanks to NetGalley, the author, and St. Martin's Press for an opportunity to review this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for sending me an ARC of American Demon by Daniel Stashower in exchange for an honest review.

American Demon centers around the life of Eliot Ness and his Cleveland team's hunt for the American Jack the Ripper.

I actually ended up DNF-ing this book at 25% of the way through for several reasons, the first being that I felt that the book was incredibly disjointed. I didn't like that there were time jumps that took you out of the story. For example, there would be a chapter revolving around the murders and then the next chapter would be focused around Ness' life before the murders, which I ultimately don't think I would have minded if at the top of each chapter, there was a time frame given for that chapter. I think this would have made it easier to keep track of where the author was taking you. I would have preferred that the entire backstory been told at once and then the story move on into the specifics of the murders and the hunt for the American Demon.

I also felt as though the book has been mistitled and that the synopsis of the book is extremely misleading based on the 25% of the book I was able to read. It felt to me that the book was more focused on Ness' life prior to the murders rather than the murders themselves as the title said.

With all of that said, I would encourage anyone to take a chance on this book if they are interested in the life of Eliot Ness. If you are looking for a book about the American Jack the Ripper, I would suggest looking for another book that is actually centered around the murders.

I knew nothing about Eliot Ness (and the little I did know was wrong) before reading American Demon. This book is a cross between a scintillating — and still unsolved — mystery and a biography of Ness. Stashower manages the two plots well, and even manages to find a probable suspect for the murders.

I'm not really a big reader of true crime, but when I saw the cover and learned this centered on Eliot Ness, I was curious. The book does deliver on what it promises: it captures a very specific time and place as thoroughly as it can in 300 pages. I wanted tommy guns and weird 1930s slang and municipal politics, and I got all that!

While this book centers on a public and mythologized figure, the author chose a great scope. This book does a great job of understanding and explaining why Ness is heavily mythologized, while also not trying to completely turn that understanding on its head.

Like a lot of nonfiction titles, I find the subtitle doesn't represent the content, but is instead tapping into what browsers may find intriguing. There is little direct parallel between Jack the Ripper and the torso killer in this book. The similarities between the two seem to be pulled directly from contemporary accounts of the torso case. I'm glad that the author didn't focus on explaining how the cases are similar at length.

As a not-true-crime reader I found it very accessible. It didn't lionize either the killer nor the prison industrial complex. The author's voice feels realistic, while not being overly simplistic (as true crime often has to be). My main criticisms are that I could have done with more.

American Demon is more than just a true crime novel. It discusses the drastic changes happening in the police force and in crime solving with the advancement of science and technology. It also is a stark look at the life of Eliot Ness, who captured America’s attention with his pursuit of Al Capone during the height of prohibition.

I was expecting there to be more focus on the ‘Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,’ but a majority of the book seemed to primarily focus on Ness. While it was still very fascinating to get a look at his life after leaving Chicago, it wasn’t really what I was expecting and a little disappointing. The parts where the murder was talked about read fairly quickly, but the biographical bits were a bit tedious and repetitive.

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur, and Daniel Stashower for the e-arc of American Demon in exchange for an honest review.

Good book but some of it felt like padding... as Elloit Ness's life slowed down so did the book. I learned a lot, though. It's got a lot of gory details for true crime fans.

Well-written. It just suffers by comparison to the titans that exist in 19th/early 20th Century true crime.

A fascinating true crime set in the US. Unfortunately I was unable to include it in my Buzzfeed roundup but I did consider it.
Thanks for the digital review copy.

This was a really interesting book, I found it a bit slow to begin with, but the pace picked up once the author started describing the torso incidents. Eliot Ness achieved great fame for bringing down Al Capone, but did you know that after that feat he became the safety director for Cleveland, a job which included looking after both the fire and police departments. Corruption was rampant in the police and he set about to clean it up and introduce measures to make being a police office safer. There was also murders that happened, bodies that were missing parts, like their head, arms or legs, they were known as the torso murders and there were a number of them. In some cases they were able to find all the parts in others they only found some. Eliot was not always involved with the investigative part, but he was informed and made decisions hoping to find the person responsible. He participated in some interrogations and door to door searching. There was a suspect identified but because he was the nephew of an important member of the federal government they had to be careful. I really thought the individual identified was the person that had done these acts. There is a lot of detail on the murders, sometimes graphic, so if you have an aversion to that kind of detail, you may want to skip this one, otherwise I would recommend. Thanks to #Netgalley and #Minotaur for the ARC.

⚫️Book Review⚫️

It’s #thrillerthursday but, I’m here to share this true crime book that I WISH was a fictional thriller. Let’s start by my saying thank you to @netgalley and @minotaur_books and @macmillan.audio for the eARC and ALC for American Demon.

Did you know that America had its own Jack the Ripper? I sure didn’t!

Most of us have heard of Eliot Ness, in passing at the minimum. He was the head of The Untouchables, the crew that worked to bring down Al Capone. After that whole shebang ended Eliot Ness went on with his life as the untouchable public figure he was and took on the role of director of public safety for Cleveland.

Eliot Ness then came face to face with the hardest case of his life. Bodies started showing up in Cleveland…and I’m not going to get into detail here because the book does that in depth. It’s brutal and awful.

I think this book was well written and I highly enjoyed learning about Eliot Ness, including much about his personal life. This murderer was just 🤢 though. There were a few parts that dragged for me, but overall I thought this book was good. Not my most favorite true crime/nonfiction book, but I would still recommend it to true crime enthusiasts!

Eliot Ness, famous for his heroic efforts to take down Al Capone and the Chicago Mob during Prohibition, was still a young man when Prohibition ended. From there, he went on to continue laudable, though lesser known, law enforcement success in Cleveland as Director of Public Safety, in charge of the police and fire departments. He went to extraordinary lengths to address the rampant corruption of the police department.
One of the many investigations he undertook was that of the “Mad Butcher”, who killed and dismembered multiple people for years without being caught. This criminal was never officially caught, but this author makes a good case for who it was and why the truth was never revealed. It appears that Ness actually did succeed at putting an end to his mayhem, but never received, nor wanted, credit for it.
I enjoyed reading this well written book. Although the title suggests that Ness and his investigation into the grisly murders is the focus of the book, I was more impressed by his admirable character and heroic exploits rooting out political corruption. These activities were much more dangerous to Ness and his men, and infinitely more consequential for the people of Cleveland.

“Ness would not have recognized himself in any of his recent portrayals, either as a bulletproof hero or a feckless drunk, and in paying so much attention to what he did in Chicago, we lose sight of the miracle he wrought in Cleveland. ‘Ness restored a sense of hope and pride to a beleaguered community,’ Clayton Fritchey wrote on the day of Ness’s resignation. ‘Today, policemen no longer have to tip their hats when they pass a gangster on the streets.

All I knew of Eliot Ness came from 2pac, so I came into Daniel Stashower’s American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper. “American Jack the Ripper” has been applied to multiple notorious killers in US history—from H.H. Holmes to the Zodiac—Stashower focuses on a the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” and the brutal killings that shocked Cleveland.

Stashower follows Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, tying famous historical events to their serial killer counterparts in compelling narrative prose. Diligently researched, Stashower presents a landslide of documents as he charts Ness’s course from Chicago’s Untouchables, through moonshine stills in Appalachia, to Cleveland’s Safety Director. It’s hard to pick and choose the best material to include, but a better filter would have been valuable. At times, the amount of information becomes overwhelming and it’s easy to get lost in the sauce.

I also felt American Demon, like Devil in the White City, could have been two distinctly separate works. I struggled in the first section to develop an accurate timeline of events because the narrative switches from Capone in 1931 to the discovery of victims in Cleveland in 1934 and tracked them both concurrently for a while. My ARC didn’t include and photos, but they may have resolved some of this confusion (if, say, there is a timeline included). Ness also doesn’t become actively involved in the case until halfway through, we readers track—a detailed and well established—Eliot Ness biography, adjacent to a true crime case happening in the same city.

Stashower’s interest in and empathy for Ness, way above the murders, compelled me to continue on. Overall, this was an interesting and insightful text and should be on the TBR for those who enjoyed Devil in the White City and David King’s Death in the City of Light.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

Title: American Demon
Author: Daniel Stashower
Release Date: September 6th, 2022
Page Count: 342
Start Date: September 1st, 2022
Finish Date: September 6th, 2022

Review:
This book follows Eliot Ness' career and what he's most known for. I found myself doing my own research through the entire book. I want to read more books about the Butcher. He's considered America's Jack the Ripper. The only reason I can think this is is because the case was never solved. This serial killer made Jack the Ripper look tame in my eyes. I feel like I don't know enough about the case to make a full opinion on it. Even though it was referenced completely in this book. It mainly highlighted Ness' involvement in the matter. It also highlighted other parts of his career as well. Including leading a team that became known as the Untouchables. There's a movie or television shows about the team. I'm interested to see if it's streaming so I can watch it. All in all, I really enjoyed this book. I really enjoyed developing the hunger to want to research and know more because of this book. I loved it so much that I bought a copy for my family to read.

This is the story of Elliott Ness and his hunt for the American Jack the Ripper. Ness was appointed Cleveland's directory of public safety. People did not believe in him, they thought he was too young to do the job and dismissed him. Little did they know who had been hired and the tenacity that he brought to the job. Ness made a difference, and this is one of his stories.

Eliot Ness’s fame rests on his involvement in taking down Al Capone, especially as portrayed in the various incarnations of the highly sensationalized The Untouchables. In this book, Stashower recounts what came next for Ness as safety director of Cleveland, though he also rehashes & demythologizes Ness’s Chicago days. As the title suggests, the book focuses mostly (but by no means exclusively) on Ness’s investigation of the string of gruesome murders and dismemberments that rocked Cleveland at this time.

If you are a fan of true crime, this book is worth your time. Don’t expect everything to wrap up in a nice, neat bow (the torso murders are still technically unsolved), but the author brings it to a satisfactory conclusion. You should be aware that this is more about the career of Eliot Ness than about any sort of innovative new approach to the murders. As long as you go into it with that understanding, it is an excellent true crime read.

1. I had no idea that there was a serial killer that taunted Cleveland in the 30's and 40's.

2. I had no idea what happened to Eliot Ness after Chicago. I was shocked to learn he came to Cleveland. As someone who lived in a suburb of Cleveland in the 70's and went to school there, I am surprised it was never talked about. <spoiler>Perhaps it is because the killer was never caught and Eliot Ness basically resigned in disgrace is the reason why</spoiler>.

3. I remember the Flats and how we were always told how dangerous they were and how they still caught on fire. It wasn't until I was in my late 20's that they finally cleaned that area up and now it is a thriving area of music and arts and the such. It was a surprise, but very welcome for the Cleveland community.

4. My father lived for a time in Bay Village [where Eliot Ness had a house]. It was one of the swankiest neighborhoods that I had ever seen at that time [I was young and impressionable. ;-) ]. I can see Mr. Ness and his family living there.

5. I love this author and would read anything he writes. Thankfully, IMO, he writes really well and writes excellent, thought-provoking books. This is no exception. This book will stay with the reader for a long time.

6. There is no happy ending here. There are moments of frustration because of this. I feel deeply for the families that are left wondering, even all these years later.

7. It is rough when one idolizes a public figure and then you find out they are just as fallible as the rest of us. That was the case here for me. I knew next to nothing about Mr. Ness except what I "learned" from the movies about him [and some historical fiction I had read that had him in it].

Again, this is a really good read. Both entertaining and, well, gross. Serial killers and their prey are never pretty and the author doesn't shy away from details, but doesn't cross that line into turning one off from reading, which is a real talent IMO. If you love true crime and want to know more about Eliot Ness and his life after Chicago and you appreciate really great writing that comes from excellent research, then this book is for you!

I was also lucky enough to get an audiobook ARC for this book and it was exceptional. Will Damron is one of my [new] favorite narrators and he does an excellent job in telling this story and really makes that time come alive. I am always glad when I can get an audiobook for an nonfiction books and even more so when it is a narrator that I love. I highly recommend listening to this book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Daniel Stashower, Will Damron - Narrator, St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books, and Macmillan Audio for providing this ARC and audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.

🔪American Demon🕵🏻‍♂️
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Another new book to check out! This one is a historical true crime nonfiction set in Cleveland during the 1930s and ‘40s! Fun fact: I have a lot of extended family up in that area and have visited several times, so I could easily picture all the locations described in this novel.

Summary: In the 1930s, Cleveland is terrorized by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, who leaves the limbs of his mutilated victims across the city every few months. When the detectives fail to make progress in the case, trusted city safety director Eliot Ness takes on the investigation with unusual tactics. As the years roll by and more victims turn up dead, Ness, who is infamous for taking down Al Capone during his stint in the Prohibition Bureau, faces his greatest challenge yet in fighting crime and corruption. This well-researched history details the forensic investigations and theories of the unsolved murders, as well as Ness’s derailed personal life over the years as he struggles to move past the one case he couldn’t close.

I found this book to be easily readable, detailed but not lengthy, and a nuanced portrait of Ness, who proved to be a morally gray, complicated man. Fans of Erik Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, and Daniel James Brown will appreciate this historical nonfiction that dives deep into Prohibtion-era politics, corruption in law enforcement, and Cleveland’s golden years as an industrial city.

American Demon is out TODAY! Many thanks to @macmillanusa and @stmartinspress and @minotaur_books and @netgalley for allowing me to read and review and eARC!

This book was presented as Elliot Ness's hunt for a serial killer. What it really was, instead, was a brief biography of Eliot Ness. I find Elliot Ness to be a fascinating person and I want to know the fact over the fiction. The stories of The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run came in here and there. I often lost the rhythm when the book went back to Eliot Ness. This was one of the serial killers that was new to me, so I had far more interest in it than in the life of Ness. Still, I enjoyed the read.

When I saw this ARC was available I was eager to read it. I've read other books by Stashower and enjoyed them and I have always wanted to know more about Eliot Ness. Growing up I faithfully watched Robert Stack in the Untouchables and that was my introduction to the true crime genre. (I don't read vast amounts of it as I prefer general mysteries) For Eliot Ness, well that was enough for me and I wasn't disappointed. Finding out who the man really was, that was what I wanted and what I got. The crimes in Cleveland were an extra. I would recommend American Demon more as a biography of Ness than as a true crime of the Torso Murders. Well researched and the writing well paced.
My thanks to the publisher Minotaur and to NetGalley for giving me an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

After The Untouchables, Eliot Ness still had decades in which to continue to rise or fall. In moving from Chicago post-Prohibition, he found both success and failure and that hard work does not carry with it a guarantee of dream fulfillment. Stashower looks at Ness’s Cleveland role through the narrow focus on a crime spree of a repulsive serial killer whose dismembered victims enthralled the news reading public at a time when forensic knowledge was primitive and unable to discern culpability to any degree. Police interrogation was likewise primitive and, compared to today, lawless and tethered to gut instinct more than science. Yet, Ness was not hired to do police work, but instead to destroy the epidemic of police corruption, a task that, along with general public safety, was his job focus. Along the way, he burned through two marriages and into a third, drinking constantly off the job, partying hard to cope with the stress of the job and a hostile press. It is a fascinating look at a man we know through the fog of a puff piece that gave fame to a man who died relatively young. He did his job well and while no man was ever arrested or proven to have committed the murders, it is Stashower’s premise that he did in fact identify the malefactor and rendered him unable to commit further atrocities. All told, it is a fascinating examination of the life of a man whose success peaked early, whose dreams remained out of reach, but whose work ethic altered Cleveland’s relationship to policing in the 20th century. A much needed look at a prominent figure in American history. Recommend.