*Named a Best Book of 2024 by FT * Nominated for the Women’s prize for nonfiction* From the Edgar AwardΓÇôwinning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding,the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London In March 1953London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Placea dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the buildingthey found another body beneath the floorboardsthen an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartmenta softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years beforeand 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 FrynChristie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacantimpersonala creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch womenthey discoveredand he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice. In this riveting true storyKate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of ChristieΓÇÖs victimsthe tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspiredand the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crimeΓÇöand suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.