Zodiac

In 1969 a killer began shooting people in the San Francisco Bay Area and then writing to the press about it. He called himself Zodiac. Robert Graysmith, who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle at the time, watched the case unfold from inside the newsroom, and it became an obsession he would not let go. This book is his account of the hunt for the killer and of the investigation he carried on himself.

The first victims were a teenage couple, stalked and shot to death in a lovers' lane. After a further murder, Zodiac sent authorities the first of his taunting notes and promised there would be more deaths. Officially he was linked to six victims, but he claimed thirty-seven, and the true number may have been as high as fifty. Graysmith portrays a man who took pleasure in torture and killing, a sexual sadist who enjoyed tormenting the people hunting him.

The book follows Zodiac's eleven-month reign of terror and the frustrations of those trying to stop him. Graysmith sets out hundreds of facts that had not been made public before, including the full text of the killer's letters. The result is a close, gripping look at one of California's best-known unsolved crimes, told by a journalist who lived with the case for years.