It was a hot Thursday evening in New York, and I did not have a book.

That was deliberate: I only had a tote bag with work computer and a change of clothes so I could walk around easily. I had been widowed a bare six weeks before, and as much as I thought a change of scene would do me good, I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went—well, there I was. I did not want to sit in my freezing hotel room looking at my phone.

Thus I found myself in a Hudson News in Grand Central Station, scanning the shelves to find something that was neither Colleen Hoover or political memoir. This was the first in what would be a chain of surprises that evening: an effort to buy a well-written, physical book in a mass market franchise—rather than via online recommendation or in a twee independent bookstore, as though I had somehow been transported back to 1997.

(That was once not so uncommon. Not so long ago, there were mass market paperbacks in the strangest places: One time I bought a copy of Michael Herr’s nonfiction Vietnam book Dispatches at a Sunflower grocery store in my hometown in Mississippi.)

All at once my eyes suddenly hit on Murderland: Time and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser. From somewhere in my mental murk, I recalled that the book was about serial killers in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. That sounded like a winner to me (at least for this particular night), and before I knew it, I was sitting in a restaurant in the tiled concourse of the station, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuters streaming around me, hunched over a toasted goat cheese salad, cracking the spine with my left hand.

Already, I felt exhilarated on some level—the improbability of it, the vestibular sense of being loosed from chains. (I had inadvertently, but providentially, left my phone back in the hotel.)

I didn’t hit on it until later, but what I was feeling was the old Walker Percy notion of a “rotation” from The Moviegoer: “A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.”

In this case, it was only partly due to the book. And pace The Moviegoer, the cinematic panoply of the experience as I experienced it was part of the surprise, and the pleasure.

But it was also very much the book, too. The opening lines of the book’s Introduction hit like a mic drop:

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhauser, Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, and serial killers.

The book is grouped roughly within the “true crime” category, which I learned via a 2024 YouGov poll is consumed by “some 57% of Americans,” but as soon was clear to me, that was just a peg on which to hang the marketing.

A native of Mercer Island, Washington, Fraser grew up amid the seventies’ efflorescence of serial killers and their attendant media, and there’s a personal narrative line about her own abusive home and teenage disaffection. But the “personal” here is wed to the political of a far wider scope.

There’s another layer of surprise here: This is a thoroughly mainstream book and Fraser herself has all the attendant privileges of the winner-take-all literary world. She went to Harvard. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

And yet none of those privileges gets in the way of the book’s immense (unimaginably immense) compassion for her subjects and the land about which she is writing. Fraser’s general hypothesis (but there is so much more to it) is that the serial killer phenomenon most likely derives from endemic lead poisoning, and thus, brain damage, of children growing up in what became the “lead smelting belt” of the Pacific Northwest.

But what Murderland also revealed, as I sat in Grand Central reading, and then kept on reading back in my hotel room that night, and all the way back to DC on the Metroliner the next day, is nothing less than an indictment—not only of serial killers and the circumstances that produce or abet them, but of rapacious capitalism, deliberately blind elites, and scores of other subjects. There’s the deliberate blindness of the Gilded Age moguls who saw no reason not to exploit the extractive potential of industry, on top of the despoiling that has already taken place of the lands of Indigenous populations. There are the factory CEOs and managers who elide regulations in the name of profit, and the local officials who disclaim the potential of any atmospheric events to cause sickness. And below those, the ominous instability inherent in the land itself, which saw Mt. St. Helens erupt in 1980 and where other potential disasters await.

And that’s just to start with. There are charts and metrics, there are photographs, and I wondered about how many other investigators and resources that Fraser must have pulled into her quest in order to develop this vast canvas—the very project she describes in this book’s opening, the effort to pull a thread of yarn from one tragedy to the next, as in a detective’s crime scene map. It is the last thing I would think of as an “airport read.”

The Salon magazine writer Andrew O’Hehir once made the observation, in a review of Sigrid Nunez’s 2006 novel The Last of Her Kind, that “the rap against American female novelists is that they lack grand ambition;” but that Nunez’s novel was the absolute opposite.

The same could also be said of Caroline Fraser, and of Murderland.

Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. 

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