The Peepshow - Review

Author: Kate Summerscale

Genre: True Crime

Format: Audiobook

Hours: 9 hours 43 minutes

This review has been so hard to write because this book is a lot. Mostly because this case is a lot, the events around this case are a lot. Just everything about this stressed me out, ticked me off, and every time I thought I'd heard the last of the worst of it. There was something else. It's a book that just keeps escalating minute after minute (or page, depending on how you're reading). But I was left feeling unsatisfied despite the guilty verdict at the end of the case. 

I just got left with a bad taste in my mouth. Which wasn't what I was expecting with this book. I originally picked it because I hadn't heard of this case. I wasn't expecting just downhill; this case was going to drag me, and how angry it was going to make me. Or the fact that at one point, I'd just be staring at my phone to make sure I heard what I was pretty sure I just heard.

Let me say this: none of this is Kate Summerscale's fault. She did an amazing job researching this case from the do-er, to the victims, to the people who made this case a sensation at the time. It's a thorough look at not just the case, by the climate of the world around the case. Summerscale does an amazing job of painting a picture and telling this story. I also loved how this book was as much about the victims as it was the man who killed them. I kept listening to this book because of her writing.

It's just the case itself that's absolutely nuts. And maybe at the time, no one realized what they were doing, what the press was doing, the harm the Home Office was doing by denying things. Maybe it's easier to see now with all the facts on the table. But I just have a hard time believing that. Someone had to realize there was a fumble on this case. That they'd maybe wrongfully hanged a man for a crime he didn't commit. A child was killed and would never get justice.

Maybe I'm just angry about it still, weeks later, and that's what makes this case so hard to stomach. All that being said, fans of the true crime genre, check this book out. It's something. It got me all riled up and yelling at myself because, just woof.

HAPPY READING!!