Murderland

Caroline Fraser grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in the same landscape where Ted Bundy hunted and left his victims. In the 1970s and 1980s he was only one of many. The region saw a strange surge of serial rape and murder, much of it horrifically brutal, and then a sudden decline. Fraser asks why it happened at all, and why it ended.

Murderland follows the lives and crimes of Bundy and others of his era, including the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler and Charles Manson. As she traces them, a second story emerges alongside the first: a pattern of environmental destruction. In Bundy's hometown of Tacoma stood one of the most toxic lead, copper and arsenic smelters in the world, and similar plants operated across the West.

Fraser's investigation builds a case that the fallout from these smelters poisoned millions of people and may also have damaged developing minds, including those of children who later became serial killers.

The author is best known for Prairie Fires, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Murderland is a work of narrative nonfiction that aims to go beyond the usual true-crime fascination with killers and look at what shaped them.