The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place

A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the year by the FT • Nominated for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Nonfiction

“ A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.” —Booklist

From the Edgar Award–winning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.

Kate Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of The Telegraph, is the author of The Book of Phobias and Manias and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a number one bestseller in the UK, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, The Wicked Boy won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and The Haunting of Alma Fielding was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Summerscale lives in London.