I find the story of Fred and Rose West and their victims grimly compelling. And Howard Sounes tells the story well. I’d seen Sounes as a talking head on TV doc’s about the Wests. He reads his own well-researched book well.
Bizarrely, perhaps, the story starts rather cozily, looking back to the family histories of Fred West and Rosemary Letts. These stories, grim enough in their own ways, are nonetheless fascinating, for the slices of lower level humdrum lives, and how these can have a devastating fallout over time.
It’s a story that starts off tragically, grows into something seedy, and then slowly grows into a barely creditable tale of monstrous depravity, bubbling below a surface that seemed relatively normal. But of course things in the West household were far from normal.
Fred’s life, from his time in Scotland, to his eventual arrest, is filled with petty crime and strange sexual shenanigans. His life as a self-employed handyman,