They told her that her father had been a criminal from Hull, and that Hull was where Ian Brady went to borstal, and a child does the arithmetic that children do.

An evil seed. That was the phrase. That was what she was for.

Christine Hart was adopted into a house where contempt was the weather. By eleven she was writing letters to the most hated man in England. By her thirties she had got closer to Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, than any journalist alive; sitting across a table from him in a Washington State penitentiary, asking her questions, waiting for the thing she had come three thousand miles to be given.

He would not give it to her. Neither of them ever would.

This is not a book about what serial killers are like. It is a book about what a certain kind of child will do to be recognised ? and what it costs to spend twenty years asking men like that to explain you to yourself.

I had put them on the throne. I had made them the gods of my universe, the keepers of the keys.

A memoir.

Chris Berry Dee: Christine Joanna Hart is a Truly Unique Crime Writer of Our Time. She not only Talks the Walk, she Walks the Talk.