Title: Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City

Author: Kate Winkler Dawson

Publisher: Hachette Books 2017

Genre: Nonfiction - History

Pages: 352

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Winter TBR

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 and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But 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. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, 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 had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows?

The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively 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.

Overall, this was a fairly interesting history narrative that failed due to clarity of writing. I was intrigued by the juxtaposition between a literal serial killer and a killer fog. I vaguely remember reading some short article about the killer fog, but didn’t know much. I did learn a lot abut the fog, but the book seemed to meander a bit and really go deep into the minutiae of politics in Parliament. The other side of the story involving the serial killer was introduced in a strange detached way. I wasn’t pulled into the story that I thought I would. Dawson doesn’t quite have the narrative talent of Erik Larson and such. The book just didn’t hold my attention from chapter to chapter.

Next up on the TBR pile: