On the evening of June 14, 2017, an electrical fire broke out on the fourth floor of a West London high-rise apartment block. This fire grew and took hold on the cladding that had been added to the exterior as part of a revamp a few years before. The cladding had a core equivalent to “pure petrol” and the fire spread up the building, burning with a speed and intensity that rendered the usual tools and tactics of the London Fire Brigade all but useless. Seventy-two people would die horrible deaths, and many more would be injured, made homeless, and lose friends and family members.

The Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy; the case made in a new book by housing journalist Peter Apps is that it was also a choice. Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing magazine, had been reporting on the dangers of flammable cladding before the fire. He has subsequently covered the inquiry into the events at Grenfell in meticulous detail. Show Me the Bodies is the culmination of many years of reporting into what Apps calls “the worst crime committed on British soil this century.” It is the best account of the Grenfell disaster and one of the most important books about British politics to come out in recent years.

Early on in the book, Apps quotes one of the lawyers for the victims and survivors of the disaster: “Grenfell is a lens through which to see how we are governed.” Apps has written a book that uses that lens to great and devastating effect. Grenfell Tower was mostly social housing, with some of the properties privately owned or rented, having been sold through “right to buy,” a scheme allowing tenants to purchase their homes from the council at heavily discounted rates.