Murderland

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, Starbucks, and serial killers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author 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, she witnessed a period when 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 only one among many that dotted the area.

As Fraser's investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of western smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, spawning a generation of serial killers. A propulsive non-fiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.