Neil Root: 7 books

The last time that anyone heard from 35-year-old Claudia Lawrence, a chef at the University of York, was when she sent a text message to a friend on 18 March 2009 at 8.23 p.m. She has never been heard from or seen again, and her disappearance is a mystery that endures to this day. What happened...

In March 1999, just months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson was assassinated when a bomb exploded under her car. The attack was claimed by a Loyalist paramilitary group but, over the last 10 years, there have been several government inquiries into...

Political idealism? Financial reward? The thrill of the chase? What drives a person to risk their life by entering the deadly world of high-level espionage? A unique investigation of the most important cases of the twentieth century, this exploration of the world’s most glamorous and dangerous...

Downfall explores, for the first time, how the Sweeney (the Flying Squad), the Elite Serious Organized Crime Unit, and the Obscene Publications Squad (the Dirty Squad) descended to unprecedented levels of corruption in the 1960s and 1970s, leading the infamous gangster Charlie Richardson to say that...

Murder has transfixed the popular press for centuries. But it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that murder began saturating front pages and making these monsters what we today recognise as modern celebrities. It was three serial killers, caught and executed in the few years...

On December 2nd, 2006, the naked body of a woman was discovered in woodland just south of the Suffolk satellite town of Ipswich. Over the next ten days, four further bodies were found. All were naked - prostitutes who worked in Ipswich's red light district - and all five had been strangled. This work presents the story of the Ipswich Killer.

The Murder Gang recounts the remarkable true story of the elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters who covered the most famous British murders between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, when murder dominated the front and inside pages of the tabloid newspapers. Members of the "Murder...