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3.69 AVERAGE
3.69 AVERAGE
This book was pitched to me as an incite into the victims of Reg Christie and having been a fan of Halle Ruebenholt’s the Five I thought it would be something similar in that it’s a contemporary author providing the maligned female victims a voice that they did not have when their murders were discovered. Instead this book is actually a detail of the coverage of the murders at 10 Rillington place and the media/ publics morbid fascination with Reg Christie. It does cover the moral and ethical dilemma that comes from true crime coverage, the various injustices that took place at the hands of the police and British criminal justice system and on the vulnerability of women- providing some of the reasons behind why a woman may have turned to sex work in the past. It was a well written, interesting book but if you’re looking for all the gorey details of the actual crime look elsewhere this book is not for that.
The level of detail is intense, and while some readers might appreciate that, I found it overwhelming. The book dives deep into the lives of peripheral figures, which made the narrative feel disjointed and hard to stay engaged with. I just couldn’t connect, and eventually decided to DNF.
dark
informative
slow-paced
Where was the editor?
This was so disjointed and jumbled, especially in the second and third part of the book. Summerscale went on so many meaningless tangents in order to dump more information on us that only distracted from the original focus of the book. I don’t actually care about the life stories of the two writers who were there, thanks. If you never give your readers a sense of who a character is and what they’re about, we won’t care what happens beyond the scope of the story. Sorry.
Beyond that, this mostly read like a veeeery long wikipedia article, but with worse organization. The analysis was very surface-level if it occurred at all. Summerscale poses a lot of questions and then doesn’t answer any of them. We’re missing the WHY in order to focus purely on HOW and WHEN. Boring!
This book needed a much tighter focus and something new to actually say. Disappointing. Did the women’s prize only read part one?
This was so disjointed and jumbled, especially in the second and third part of the book. Summerscale went on so many meaningless tangents in order to dump more information on us that only distracted from the original focus of the book. I don’t actually care about the life stories of the two writers who were there, thanks. If you never give your readers a sense of who a character is and what they’re about, we won’t care what happens beyond the scope of the story. Sorry.
Beyond that, this mostly read like a veeeery long wikipedia article, but with worse organization. The analysis was very surface-level if it occurred at all. Summerscale poses a lot of questions and then doesn’t answer any of them. We’re missing the WHY in order to focus purely on HOW and WHEN. Boring!
This book needed a much tighter focus and something new to actually say. Disappointing. Did the women’s prize only read part one?
informative
medium-paced
This book was so boring. It felt like the author didn’t have enough material for a book so just tried to stretch out what they had which resulted in unrelated excessive info and repetitiveness. I skimmed the last half.
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
dark
informative
medium-paced
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
A rather repetitive telling of a serial murderer in London.
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
The Peepshow:The Murders at 10 Rillington Place is a meticulously researched true crime narrative, which follows the investigation and trial following the discovery of four women's bodies plus more human remains in a Notting Hill boarding house in 1952. Just three years earlier, a woman and her child were killed there; her husband later convicted and hanged. Were there two murderers living in the same house, or was there a miscarriage of justice? And if so, what contributed to that? I would have liked this book to focus more on the women victims and less on the male killer. On the other hand, I appreciated the way the author tied the case to social conditions and attitudes at the time. She excelled at portraying the dark, gritty reality of London at the time; the blatant racism was particularly confronting . Poverty and misogyny clearly contributed to these crimes, while the illegality of abortion and the prejudice against sex workers played into the killer's hands. I wasn't familiar with the case before I read the book. This may be a good thing - many reviewers felt it offered nothing new - but it also meant I lacked any particular interest in or connection to it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Rape, Murder
Moderate: Misogyny, Abortion
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Definitely reading outside my genre!
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced