RaveThe Times Literary SupplementSummerscale’s greatest achievement...is to empathize with the victims of Christie’s violence. In the \'true crime\' genre there is a tendency to focus on the monstrous criminal, leaving his victims to fade into the background. The author resists this temptation, revealing the complex characters of the women who were murdered ... A meticulously researched and lively tale of crime, journalism and gender roles in postwar Britain. Inevitably, [Summerscale] is sometimes forced to speculate about aspects of lives for which there is no written evidence, but her depth of knowledge and storytelling skills allow her to do so convincingly.
Sebastian Junger
PanThe GuardianJunger is particularly insightful when he is discussing combat soldiers and the difficulties they experience when returning from war zones. He makes the provocative, but plausible, observation that one of the reasons American combat veterans suffer such high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is because they find it difficult to separate out the harm of war from its pleasures ... But in many other ways, this is a deeply unsatisfactory book. The chief problem is that Junger is nostalgic for a world that never existed – at least not for most people .. the idea that 'poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities' simply does not ring true ... I don’t understand Junger’s glamorisation of violence, disaster and catastrophe.
