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 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.
