In the Dark: The True Story of the Blackout Ripper

This book was a fabulous read. I bought it for a number of friends who thought the same thing. I read it from cover to cover in about 2 days, finding it very hard to put down. I also had to get up a few times to recheck the locks on my doors! This book was very well written and I highly recommend it.

I just finished a rip-roaring read of "In the Dark" by Simon Read. This was a page-turner of the first order, a breathless, head-on trip down the London Blackout road to hell. With not a word to spare, Mr. Read offered a fascinating look into the other London of the 1940s, replete with booze, sex, murder, and the stuff of nightmares that crawls out from under rocks when it's dark. The amazing part of the story is the dogged determination of the detectives who nailed the RAF sociopath with a combination of intelligence and common sense gumshoing. Readers will not be disappointed with the author's almost fictional storytelling style because it allows us to peek into the psyches of the killer and his hapless victims as though they had given interviews after the fact. Mr. Read obviously did his homework in researching this case due to the detail and scope of the facts therein. This book is a "must read" for any true crime buff, guaranteed.

Simon Read strikes again... John Douglas, author of Mindhunter and one of the agents who started the FBI's Behavioral Profiling Unit, once said that serial killers shouldn't be treated like celebrities. Rather, they should be given sneering nicknames and treated like the scum they are. Simon doesn't give "The Blackout Ripper" any derrogatory nicknames, but he doesn't give the guy any breaks, either. And that's what I love about this book. So many true crime novels give a dramatic spin to the murderer. They're given a status far beyond what they deserve, elevated to the ranks of purest evil rather than pointed up as the dregs they are. You get a "poor darling" sense as horrible childhoods are excavated for some reason why such a nice, quiet guy happens to be such a sadistic [...]. Simon doesn't deliver that kind of schlock. What he gives you is unvarnished reality. He writes in such a way that you can feel the old London pavements under your feet, cringing fear as you become a citizen dodging not only Luftwaffe bombs but also the killer taking full advantage of blackout conditions to live his sick fantasies. You get to meet this [...] face-to-face, and you get to stare into the all-too-human face of inhumanity. The book creates a total atmosphere. You will end up feeling the grinding despair of people dealing with two very overwhelming situations, and you will get to see not only the worst predations of a man, but the amazing things ordinary people can do. There was a war on. They shouldn't have had to deal with a murderer on top of it. But they did. And Simon gives them the rare gift of telling it just like it was, making sure those extraordinary ordinary people will not be forgotten.