The Peepshow

The UK's top-selling true crime writer and author of the #1 bestseller, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, takes on the notorious 1950s murders at 10 Rillington Place

'Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime' Val McDermid

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 human bones in the garden. But the case at Rillington Place - a double murder committed three years prior - had already been solved, the guilty hanged. These new murders suggested two things. First, police might have got the wrong man. And second, a serial killer of women was now at large in England.

A nationwide manhunt was launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Proctor chased after the scoop. Crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged to cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: a vacant creature of a brutish post-war world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realised that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice: the first of the Rillington trials hinged on his evidence.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the unprecedented tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime, and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.