Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

An Edgar Award finalist for True Crime • A National Bestseller • A Washington Post Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Forbes, NPR, Vulture, Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Newsweek, New York Post, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews, and The Nerve • A finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction “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?