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Book Cover for: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Caroline Fraser

Reader Score

79%

79% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 15 reviews on

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A National Bestseller

"Scorching, seductive . . . A superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges." --Los Angeles Times

"This is about as highbrow as true crime gets." --Vulture

"Fraser has outdone herself, and just about everyone else in the true-crime genre, with Murderland." --Esquire

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond--a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and '80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem--the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson--Fraser's Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser's investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.

A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Penguin Press
  • Publish Date: Jun 10th, 2025
  • Pages: 480
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.40in - 6.50in - 1.70in - 1.50lb
  • EAN: 9780593657225
  • Categories: United States - State & Local - Pacific Northwest (OR, WA)Murder - Serial KillersHistorical

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About the Author

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for best biography of the year. She is also the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, and London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.

More books by Caroline Fraser

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Book Cover for: God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Caroline Fraser
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Book Cover for: Environmentalism and the Mass Media: The North/South Divide, Graham Chapman

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