Coffee & Crime

Murderland by Caroline Fraser

Do you watch every true crime documentary, or are you hooked on crime podcasts? This book club is for you! Each month, we'll discuss a different true crime book.

2nd Floor Conference Room

This month we will be reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.

An Edgar Award winner for True Crime • A National Bestseller • 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

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.