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

FROM BRITAIN'S TOP-SELLING TRUE CRIME WRITER AND THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER...

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

‘Remarkable . . . Gripping . . . Its shocking truths are necessary ones’ Erica Wagner, Financial Times

‘Every bit the gripping, page-turning treat’ Mark Bostridge, Spectator

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.

'A gripping account of murder, misogyny and spectatorship' Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith

'A forensic reappraisal of a grimy episode in postwar British history . . . Shocking, impeccably researched, lucidly written and always utterly compelling' Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project

'The queen of true crime' Laura Thompson, author of Take Six Girls

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

"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" - Financial Times

"An inspired storyteller . . . Summerscale’s greatest achievement is to empathize with the victims of Christie’s violence. In the ‘true crime’ genre there is a tendency to focus on the monstrous criminal, leaving his victims to fade into the background. The author resists this temptation, revealing the complex characters of the women who were murdered . . . A meticulously researched and lively tale of crime, journalism and gender roles in postwar Britain" - TLS

"The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place is Kate Summerscale’s most affecting historical true crime since The Suspicions of Mr Whicher . . . She pieces together Christie in the way you might try to repair a smashed mirror: no matter how well the pieces seem to fit, the overall impression is that of disturbingly multifarious personality who seemed, while on trial, “a bemused spectator of his own atrocities” . . . All told, it’s a masterful piece of work" - Irish Times

"Every bit the gripping, page-turning treat that true crime fanatics salivate for. What sets it apart is the author’s decision to use this classic murder story to expose the rotten underside of post-war Britain in the early 1950s. She paints a backdrop of grime and squalor, of flickering gas lamps, toxic smogs and bombed-out dereliction, bringing to the fore a society that routinely demeaned women and eroticised violence against them, particularly through a flourishing tabloid press" - Spectator

"Takes a novel approach to the retelling of the Christie murders . . . [Summerscale] skewers an era, the squalid, rackety, hand-to-mouth life of 1950s London, its pawn shops and doss houses and late-night cafes . . . The Peepshow invites us to look closer" - Observer

"As one would expect from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, this is a riveting read, grisly and chilling though much of the detail is. By making the figures of Harry Procter and Fryn Tennyson Jesse so prominent, Summerscale finds a new way of telling the story, and she draws on an impressive amount of research to re-create a postwar world of bombsites, squalid living conditions, prostitution, backstreet abortions and eye-wateringly blatant racism, while not neglecting the wider, happier world represented by the coronation" - Literary Review

"Engrossing" - Crime Monthly

"Littered with delicious details of time and place . . . I don’t do true crime, but this is one of the best books I’ve read all year" - RTÉ 1 Arena

"You feel, as she describes Notting Hill in 1953, and all that is going on there, that this is alien soil. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot would have been out of their depth, though maybe Dostoyevsky would have felt at home" - The Tablet

"Quite apart from its superb pacing and prose, its deep social history, there is a brilliant strain of feminism" - Laura Cumming (on X/Twitter), author of THUNDERCLAP