The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place

Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher) revisits one of the most controversial murder cases in British history in this engrossing true crime page-turner. In 1953, a tenant at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, was fixing a kitchen shelf when he tore a hole in the wallpaper and discovered a female corpse behind the wall. Police found three more bodies at the scene, including one buried beneath the floorboards of a room once rented to Reg Christie and his wife, Ethel. That body was identified as Ethel’s, spurring police to arrest Christie and try him for murder. Christie’s eventual conviction and admission to several other murders, despite his questionable mental state, cast doubt on the execution, three years earlier, of Timothy Evans, whose wife’s and infant daughter’s bodies were found on the same property. After laying out the facts of the case, Summerscale parses Christie’s misogyny and experiences fighting in WWI for clues about his motives. Though she doesn’t land on anything definitive, she introduces a few eyebrow-raising wrinkles to the publicly accepted narrative and paints a compassionate portrait of the victims. It’s a rigorous look at a still-potent tragedy. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (May)