The Peepshow

The Murders at Rillington Place

By: Kate Summerscale

Narrated by: Nicola Walker

A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the year by FT • Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction • Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction

“A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.” —Booklist

From the Edgar Award–winning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.

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. 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.

Fascinating story

This notorious crime was unknown to me. It took place over many years with multiple victims and several suspects. The storytelling was muddled. Skipped around too much in time and would really benefit from a straightforward chronological timetable. Also got off on side tangents to two different journalists.

A thoroughly researched time

Seeing the events through the eyes of Harry Proctor (reporter) and Fryn Jesse (novelist) was a creative way to tell this story. I was shocked at the racism, misogyny, miscarriages of justice and the murders by Christie' hand.
A compelling book and horrific story.
Also, I enjoyed the narrator!

The details

The details in this book had details. Individuals were often identified by such details as eye color, height, clothing. The research must have been exhaustive.

horribly boring

Just could not get interested at all. Quit after a while, could not take it!