I was sort of on board with this book up until the point where a picture of Lesley Ann Downey's torture is featured. The writing style was dry to the point of chapping, with only ominous attempts at segways that were more cheap than compelling. It’s hard not to hate Myra more as she was a woman and easy to trust and she used that to her advantage.

This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. An original, feminist dissection of the local culture, media circus and police investigation surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper case. Williams acted in and wrote additional dialog for both the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Jamaica Inn (1939). Williams' plays "Yesterday's Magic," "The Morning Star" and "Someone Waiting" were also performed on Broadway, and he had a success on the Great White Way as an actor himself in a solo performance as Charles Dickens, which he revived twice. In this book, many artifacts become public for the first time, including photographs from Ian Brady’s ‘Tartan album’, police interviews and witness statements, which shed vital new light on Brady, Hindley and the dangerous cocktail their union became.In it Emlyn Williams has achieved superbly his objective: “The dual accuracy of history and of imaginative understanding. The journey to their murdering trail was precisely planned and the team worked out how they would entice their victims, deciding that children were easier to entice and then murder. Very good insight to the pair with a fair bit of new info I didn’t know, a difficult but necessary book in my opinion which I liked. John Williams's Into the Badlands opened up the world of American crime fiction for me and a generation.

If nothing, I hoped it would just be a recounting of the events, and as someone who doesn’t remember much of anything most of the time, I thought I’d be having an engaging time, either way. Even at the expense of there own safety, knowing they were only safe because they were complicit in the horrendous crimes? The selling point for me was the unseen photographs that Cook discovered, and those I was remained intrigued by—though I must warn whoever decides to read this that there is a very disturbing photograph present of one of the victims of this case, Lesley Ann Downey, taken moments before her death. I’ve seen documentaries over the years, and I find them disturbing but still very intriguing as a true crime fan.I normally rate the books I review, but on this occasion I won’t – I feel it’s disrespectful to the victims and their families. This was such a sad story and for the 5 victims I can’t help but feel so much anger towards these two murderers.

Bottom line this is an extraordinary read even though hard material to process due to its nature of unthinkable crimes against sweet innocent children.

In the 1960s, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady turned the desolate yet serene countryside of Saddleworth Moor into a burial ground, disposing of their murder victims in the deep soil. Born George Emlyn Williams in Pen-y-Ffordd, Mostyn, Flintshire in northeast Wales on November 1905, he lived in a rural village in which Welsh was spoken until he was 12 years old, when his family moved to an English-speaking town, Connah's Quay. This was the first book that I ever read on the infamous Moors Murderers and I must say that it has had me gripped and intrigued on the subject now since I first read it 26 years ago! However, the public still have many questions about who they were and how their dysfunctional relationship operated.

It makes you believe it though by dealing with events in a fairly factual manner and by bringing many views into the book eg interviews with the people involved and including some court transcripts verbatim. You have been in the room with Brady and Hindley, you have been there for a murder, there for an abduction, there in the office and out on the Moors at night. The book has much in common with the genre of writing known as New Journalism since it narrates an actual murder case through the author's own creative interpretations and idiosyncratic literary style.The inclusion of the many (at least for me) previously unseen images of the victims, crime scenes, mugshots and moors scenes was also fascinating and really brought the story to life. This story had a lot of information on Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, as well as each case on the 5 victims. I only wish we could have learned more about their victims, who after all are the important ones here.