DEATH IN THE AIR

Sub-titled 'The True Story of a Serial Killer, The Great London Smog, and The Strangling of A City', this is a book about a killer fog and a killer loose amidst it. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit. For five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip. Day became night, transport ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. In the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London women were going missing - poor women, forgotten women, whose disappearance has caused little alarm. Each had one thing in common - the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man named John Reginald Christie who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the Beast of Rillington Place caused a media frenzy. Were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that cause Christie to suddenly snap and what role had he played in the notorious double murder that happened in the same apartment, building not three years before, a murder for which another probably innocent man was sent to the gallows? Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids three strands together in a taut, readable, true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today. In the words of Simon Winchester, who became asthmatic at the age of seven as a result of the Great Smog "she is to be commended for telling a terrible tale memorably and brilliantly." Kate certainly includes much first-hand reportage and we feel we are there in blackout with bodies in the mist and a madman on the loose who strangled at least seven women and a baby. Illustrations, 341 pages.