This is Kelsey with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
It’s been a few years since I recommended Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer prize-winning book Prairie Fires here on Check It Out and it seemed only right that I be the one to celebrate her latest work which is quite the departure from her previous book. Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers is one of the twelve featured titles on this year’s Adult Summer Reading list at the Sioux City Public Library.
An Edgar Award finalist for True Crime, a National Bestseller, named a Best Book of the Year by the likes of The New Yorker, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, LitHub, and Kirkus Reviews, and a finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, author Caroline Fraser has upped the game in the true crime genre and truly outdone herself with Murderland.
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 skillfully maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser's Pacific Northwestern death tour begins to uncover a deeper mystery and presents an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. A meld of true crime, memoir, and social commentary, this nonfiction work isn’t for the faint of heart, yet I just couldn’t stop reading.
Check out Murderland and other featured titles on this year’s Adult Summer Reading list at your Sioux City Public Library.
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