challenging dark informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced
dark informative sad medium-paced
dark reflective sad slow-paced
dark informative mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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. 
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kathispathi's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 8%

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?
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