Red Ripper

He was a soft-spoken grandfather, a family man and a retired English teacher. But beneath the model-citizen exterior of Andrei Chikatilo lurked the most heinous of criminals - the serial killer. Sexually mutilating and eating his victims, his 12-year rampage in southern Russia finally came to an end in 1990, when an uncannily accurate profile of him by a local psychologist led police to him. He has admitted killing 11 boys and 42 girls and young women. This book probes the mind of this killer.

Peter Conradi is a British author and journalist. He is currently foreign editor of the Sunday Times. He has previously been a foreign correspondent in Belgium, Switzerland, and the Soviet Union. Conradi’s books include The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia’s Most Brutal Serial Killer, Mad Vlad: Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the New Russian Nationalism, Hitler’s Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl, and, with coauthor Mark Logue, the bestselling The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy, the inspiration for the Academy Award–winning film of the same name. His forthcoming book, Who Lost Russia?: How East and West Fell In and Out of Love, will be published in December 2016.