The Light Inside Serial Killers

She wanted to have sex with serial killers. But it wasn't sex she was looking for.

At thirteen, Christine Hart found a paperback under her adoptive mother's bed and looked into the eyes of Ian Brady. She wrote to him for eight years before he answered. She sat alone with him in a locked hospital room. Years later she flew six thousand miles with her small son to Walla Walla, past gun towers and armed guards, to sit with Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler.

She wasn't looking for love. She was looking for something behind their eyes.

Because when she was nine, in a strange bed in Dublin, she had seen it. A white light poured out of her father's eyes, and something old and cold and curious looked out of him and lifted her up, higher than the ceiling should have let her go. Something that wasn't human.

Then she forgot. And a little girl in a pink nightdress began to run through black trees, and Christine spent her life chasing her: into prisons, into newsrooms, into back rooms full of people who had been taken in the night.

This is a lifelong compulsion laid bare. A hunt into the minds of two of the world's most notorious killers, and a second, stranger hunt for the light she saw as a child, and the grey shapes that came with it.

Sinister, haunting and utterly true.

Praise for Christine Hart

"Hart not only talks the talk, she walks the walk. Many writers claim to have interviewed serial killers; Hart actually went into the cells and sat with them. Her research on serial killers is a must-read. Hart is a truly unique crime writer of our time." Christopher Berry-Dee, author of Talking with Serial Killers

"Hart has a rare perception." Colin Wilson

"Reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs. Hard to put down." News of the World

"This could have been the best book ever written about a childhood." Daily Mail