Murderland Crime and bloodlust in the time of serial killers

Review by Booklist Review

Fraser, who examined the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Pulitzer Prize--winning Prairie Fires (2017), takes a look at another, much darker aspect of American mythology: the rise of serial killers in the 1970s and '80s. Fraser links this alarming spike--from double digits in the 1940s and '50s to as many as 768 in 1980--to heavy pollution from lead smelting in the mid-twentieth century in the areas of the country where some of the most violent and prolific killers grew up, including Dennis Rader (BTK), Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), and Ted Bundy, the killer Fraser follows the most closely. She makes a case that isn't merely convincing; it's downright damning, showing how lead seeped into literally every aspect of life for those who lived near a smelter--and even for those who didn't--via leaded gas and paint. Fraser herself grew up on Mercer Island, across one floating bridge from Seattle, and she wonders, in hindsight, if her father's violent behavior was in any way influenced by the proximity of the Ruston smelter in nearby Tacoma, which is where Bundy grew up. Fraser follows the exploits of the similarly deadly and devastating serial killers and ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining Company) in a narrative that is gripping, harrowing, and timely.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

What makes a murderer? Pulitzer winner Fraser (Prairie Fires) makes a convincing case for arsenic and lead poisoning as contributing factors in this eyebrow-raising account. Fraser, who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where smelters belted out poison for decades and a proliferation of serial killers in the 1970s and '80s earned the region the nickname "America's Killing Fields," marries a poignant memoir of her Washington State childhood with a vivid catalog of crimes by Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and others. Throughout, she forges links between ballooning 20th-century crime statistics and declining health outcomes due to pollution, noting that the so-called "golden age" of serial killers came to an end in the '90s as leaded gasoline was banned, smelters shut down due to decreasing profits, and the Environmental Protection Agency stepped up pollution controls. While it initially sounds far-fetched when, for instance, Fraser links brutal violence on Mexico's borders--where 500 women were murdered between 1993 and 2011--to a rise in unregulated factory towns, her methodical research and lucid storytelling argue persuasively for linking the health of the planet to the safety of its citizens. This is a provocative and page-turning work of true crime. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (June)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A provocative, eerily lyrical study of the heyday of American serial killers. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the number of serial killers in the U.S. rose precipitously, and the Pacific Northwest was, disproportionately, home for them; Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer), Jack Spillman (aka the Werewolf Butcher), and more hailed from the region. Observers attributed this to mere coincidence, or perhaps a side effect of the gloomy climate. Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc.), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Northwest native, suggests a more direct culprit: the region's high concentration of smelters, which released derangingly high levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere. (Notable serial killers elsewhere in the country had similar backgrounds; Dennis Rader, aka BTK, grew up near a smelter in Kansas' "lead belt.") Fraser's book layers the evidence for this argument (known as the lead-crime hypothesis) precisely but with a novelistic structure, braiding together biographies of the killers (Bundy most prominently and prolifically), the growth of firms like mining and smelting companies ASARCO (controlled by the Guggenheim family), tragic incidents on a precarious floating bridge connecting Seattle and Mercer Island, and Fraser's own recollections of growing up in a time and place when young women were inordinately targeted and killed. She depicts a lot of death; Fraser is determined to make the reader see the worst of the killers' actions, in vivid but unsensationalistic detail, to underscore the ever-escalating crises that mining and smelting businesses tried to underplay, pay off, or ignore. By the '90s, as bans on leaded gasoline took effect, smelters closed, and the EPA set stricter pollution standards, the number of serial killers dissipated. Fraser's book is an engrossing and disturbing portrait of decades of carnage that required decades to confront. A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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