She is best known for the bestselling narrative nonfiction books The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which was made into a television drama, The Wicked Boy and The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
[3] She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House,[4] based on a real-life crime committed by Constance Kent and investigated by Jack Whicher, a book described in Literary Review as an altogether "deft 21st-century piece of cultural detection" which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008.
[12] In a piece she wrote for the Guardian, Summerscale said she found chilling resonances between the murders at 10 Rillington Place and modern events.
It starred Paddy Considine and Peter Capaldi and was adapted by Neil McKay and Helen Edmundson.
[14] The Haunting of Alma Fielding is being developed as a limited series by Charlotte Stoudt and Minkie Spiro, of New Pictures, who also made Fosse/Verdon.