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? 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.
