PRE-ORDER: The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale (HC)

London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.

REVIEWS

"A gripping, pacily written peek into a lost world." ― Robbie Millen, The Times, Books of the Year

"A remarkable new look at the Rillington Place murders . . . In a manner reminiscent of Hallie Rubenhold in The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Summerscale restores the dignity of Christie's victims . . . In portraying the public hunger for sensationalism, or chronicling the race riots in Notting Hill in 1958, the author draws no explicit parallels with the present day. She trusts that her readers will make their own conclusions, and her work is the more powerful for it. I hope she will forgive me if I say that - in the best sense - this is an awful book: but its shocking truths are necessary ones." - Erica Wagner ― Financial Times

"Summons up a murky London underworld . . . The Peepshow examines the macabre saga with tremendous skill and verve." ― The Times

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardback Edition
Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus
ISBN:   978-1526660480
Pages: 320