Focusing on five days in the winter of 1952 in London, a dual historical narrative of an iconic city menaced by both a serial killer and a cloud of toxic smog.
...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.
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.
