“In Murderland Fraser returns to her own native landscape the Pacific Northwest to explore
why the region has produced such a large number of serial killers. In this brooding and often
brave book the author finds evil afoot but the worst monsters aren’t who you’d guess.” –
Boston Globe Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by LitHub 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? 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 hardly
unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds evidence mounts that the
plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young
minds including some who grew up to become serial killers. A propulsive nonfiction thriller
Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology taking readers on a profound
quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.
