The Peepshow By Kate Summerscale

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
Financial Times – Erica Wagner

Summons up a murky London underworld . . . The Peepshow examines the macabre saga with tremendous skill and verve
The 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 – Joanna Bourke

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 – Declan Burke

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 – Mark Bostridge

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 – Anthony Quinn

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 – Nigel Andrew

Journalistic hunger for lurid detail combines with intelligent consideration of the ethical implications of exploring true crime
Tablet, Books of the Year – Maggie Fergusson

Now, we can re-examine [the murders] through the probing eyes and incisive mind of Kate Summerscale, who has a penchant for the macabre in British domestic life and a gift for conjuring the feel and smell of a time and a place … Gripping … Summerscale has worked hard to find out as much as she can about the lives of each of Christie’s victims
London Review of Books – Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Engrossing
Crime Monthly