Though centred around the crimes of the infamous serial killer Reg Christie, the book is actually a panorama of British society in wartime and through postwar austerity. We follow an incredibly varied cast of real characters, from police officers, forensic scientists and reporters to landladies, lorry drivers and sex workers, through the bombed-out streets, pubs and slums of west London. Summerscale effortlessly shows how the grim and chaotic conditions of economic depression, war and imperial decline provided a backdrop to the tragic and difficult lives of Christie’s victims. Yet she also has tremendous sympathy for them, focussing on their struggles to live and be happy at a time when options for women, who had been briefly liberated by the Second World War, were once again becoming limited by a patriarchal society. We also see the contemporary backdrop of casual racism and xenophobia faced by the black and Irish inhabitants of Christie’s Notting Hill, a legacy that affects the UK to this day. With The Peepshow, Kate Summerscale has reaffirmed her reputation as one of our leading non-fiction authors, demonstrating that true crime can go beyond voyeuristic fascination to uncover and memorialise misunderstood times, places and people.

I read this ARC for an honest review All thoughts and opinions are mine I really enjoyed this and would recommend

Kate Summerscale does an excellent job here exploring not only the awful crimes committed by Reg Christie at 10 Rillington Place but also what it was to live in the early 1950's in London, from the coronation of a new Queen to the journalistic hoops jumped through for the ultimate scoop. The victims are treated with compassion and care and the true horror of how a perfectly, it seems,and unobtrusive man could cause such destruction is thoughtfully complied. It is the skill of a truly great author to entwine these threads into such a page turner .A truly memorable book.

As someone that consumes most of their true crime content through a podcast or documentary, I was so excited to pick this up. Kate does a phenomenal job setting up the scene in every chapter, and fleshes out each individual in this harrowing story to an incredible extent. This book reads like fiction; it’s so easy to get sucked in. I couldn’t put this down. While she doesn’t shy away from the horrors and spares no detail, Kate brings such an outstanding level of respect to the victims and honours them in ways that the authorities around them unfortunately neglected to. I’d like to thank the publishers for sending out a reading copy in exchange for an honest review. I’ll definitely be purchasing the rest of this author’s catalog.

The Peepshow is an extremely well researched look at the infamous murders which took place in 10 Rillington Place and whether there was a miscarriage of justice leading to the execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his wife and child rather than serial killer John Christie, who was responsible for the other deaths at the address. So much has already been said about the case, in print and film, that it’s difficult to find a new angle but Kate Summerscale does a good job. The book looks at the murders themselves, at Christie and Evans personally and tells us some more about the victims (often treated as a faceless afterthought) but also looks at the media frenzy surrounding it. We look at a journalist who has had previous contact with Christie and is covering the story for a sensationalist newspaper, and at a true crime writer also writing about the case. Newspaper readership at the time was enormous and the story was everywhere so it’s easy to see a comparison between the way this story became a mass talking point and how such cases today go viral on social media. The true crime writer is doing a somewhat more nuanced take but her detachment from the victims themselves is striking and it’s interesting to see that even in the 1940s and 1950s, true crime held a strange fascination for many people. Summerscale also does an excellent job of portraying the suffocating atmosphere of the time, especially for woman and those with less money. It’s a grim life for many of those involved and racism and poverty are everywhere. Christie himself is obviously shown as a very disturbing figure, but there is some very interesting detail about his own damage from injury in the First World War and the author does try to be even handed in her coverage. She’s also very careful to give a balanced view of arguments both for and against a miscarriage of justice and makes clear that the conclusion reached is her own and we’ll never really know for sure. The book is very thorough but it’s also well written and fast moving so never felt like hard work to get through. It’s a horribly fascinating case and this book is an excellent addition to the works about it.