...a stellar examination of a turbulent time in the city’s history ... Dawson’s background in documentaries and journalism makes this journey more than just a retelling of the facts. She tracked down people who lived it, and now readers will vividly experience that period as well.
...an intriguing book about this silent disaster ... Those parallel plotlines never quite intersect. Death in the Air would've been an even more compelling book without Dawson's somewhat forced attempt to make connections between these two London 'stranglers' ... Another strike against the Christie story is that his grisly career has been exhaustively documented in books and films ... Dawson cuts a precise narrative path through the smog by marshaling together an array of government and newspaper reports and interviews with people who lived through those terrible five days when trains, buses and ships on the Thames came to a standstill and crime was rampant. Most affecting are the first-person recollections of a woman who was 13 years old that winter.
The link between the killer fog and the serial killer exists only in the author’s construct. Christie’s killing spree began nine years before the 1952 fog, and none of his victims was killed while the fog held its grip on London; his killing spree ended three months after the fog lifted. Although the fog and the Christie killings remain two distinct, alternating strands, each story is compelling ... Dawson recounts the facts of the disaster clearly, but she falls short in capturing the human toll ... Though written in a sometimes lurid style, as if the author had read too many penny dreadfuls, Death in the Air is an enlightening look at two lesser known but important events in British history, for both had far-reaching consequences.
A gripping read that illuminates two dark crimes: The political scandal of London's Great Smog of 1952, which killed an estimated 12,000 people; and the frightening deeds of a human killer both demented and mundane … Cutting back and forth in time as Christie plans new murders, Dawson introduces a wider cast of characters who grapple with the suffocating horror of the smog, the killer's machinations or both. Among them are doctors who are largely impotent as the bodies pile up; police officials who fail to connect the deadly dots on Christie; and sleaze-peddling journalists who make him a celebrity sicko during his trial.
Dawson deftly weaves the tales together in an engrossing narrative that reads like a thriller. Christie’s story benefits from being told alongside that of the smog, creating a more sinister, darkly romantic atmosphere than a traditional true-crime book. The main weaknesses in Dawson’s debut concern the endings of the two primary narrative threads. In the case of the smog, the author effectively shows how the government’s too-little, too-late solutions to keep the deadly event from repeating itself were completely unsatisfactory, but she doesn’t go deep enough into how woefully inadequate they proved to be. Regarding Christie, in an anticlimactic conclusion, he confessed and was hanged seemingly because he decided he didn’t feel like hiding the bodies anymore ... Despite a few minor flaws, readers will remain hooked on this compelling story.
Juxtaposing the stories of the fog and Christie’s crimes, Ms. Dawson maintains, offers a flavor of postwar life in Britain and illuminates ‘the way in which humans experience fear’ … Ms. Dawson, a journalist and documentary producer, is an assiduous researcher. She resists, for the most part, exploiting the Grand Guignol aspects of her narrative, and her portraits of the ordinary people confronted by the depredations of the fog and Christie are moving. But the book can be frustrating. Its paired subjects are unrelated—Christie’s main killing spree didn’t begin until after the fog had ceased—and hence don’t illuminate each other … Finally, there are puzzling omissions.
...[an] evocative but scattered historical study ... Other than serving as a metaphorical embodiment of the smog (he asphyxiated victims with coal gas), Christie has no clear purpose in the narrative, but his story does supply an intriguing true-crime subplot in the smog’s aftermath while parliamentary debate about the smog drags on. The smushed-together narratives add up to a grim, Dickensian portrait of postwar London: broke, grimy, dejected, deranged around the edges, and gasping for breath.
