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Death in the Air

the True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City
Mar 07, 2018aafleming rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
This remarkably boring book is mostly about a particularly bad London fog in 1952. The author somehow thought it would be a good idea to try to weave in the story of the English serial killer Christie, who was operating in London during this time, though for a period of YEARS, not just during the fog. The book might be of interest to a meteorologist, or a scientist, but her endless descriptions of dirt and air pollution are unlikely to be interesting to the general reader. This is probably the reason that the story of the serial killer is clumsily interjected and in fact probably that was the only reason this book got published. But HIS story is not really very interesting either, especially because the author seems obsessed with describing all of his medical problems. By the time I was about a fifth of the way through this book, and had read the endless descriptions of dirt, greasy fog, people coughing up yellow phlegm and collapsing on the street, and Christie's symptoms of colitis, I felt sick and depressed and stopped reading.