An interesting investigation by Bill James, the sabrematrician, and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, into an early twentieth century serial killer. Their account is a little labyrinthine. Most interesting are the discussions about how rural America changed from 1900 to 1910 with the coming of the wire services, the use of private investigators who were sometimes just con-men for murder investigations, and how both a deep country-wide racism and the police practice of picking up any nearby societally marginal suspect and forcing a confession led to the prosecution, imprisonment, lynching or execution of many innocent people.
There is a common technique of humor in which the last in a series, or just the last comment in a paragraph, is incongruous in some way, or is out of order, or is juxtaposed inappropriately to something else. Offhand, I don’t know what this technique is called, but Bill James uses it; often by dropping the sophistication of his language at the end of a paragraph and using a somewhat cruder simile or word choice than expected. This sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn’t. In a book about a serial killer, it may be not just locally inappropriate, but globally inappropriate. ( )

I think a writer, who says about the slaughter of a family by the name of Pfanschmidt, that the "schmidt had hit the pfan" says it all about this book........... ( )

This had the potential to be a better book, and it really needed an editor. The subject matter is very interesting, and the authors do have a knack for spotting (potential) patterns. They also clearly did a lot of research. In particular, they apparently exhausted newspaper archives to find early twentieth century ax murders.

I say "apparently," because the book has no works cited or bibliography. That's a tremendous shortcoming in a historical work like this one. The authors frequently quote from newspaper accounts of murders, but there's no way for an interested reader to follow up those stories.

A related issue is the lack of index. The book is lengthy, and it covers a lot of territory, both geographically and thematically. There are countless place names, family names, and side characters. I often found myself flipping back, trying to remember (for instance) what happened in Paola, Kansas, several hundred pages ago. Because the book lacks an index, you will be doing a lot of flipping.

A lot of similar books (true crime or history) contain a cast of characters or a list of relevant place names. An appendix containing that information would have been extremely helpful. Because the authors did do a lot of research, there's simply a lot of information to absorb, and it's difficult to keep it all straight.

The author's tone is pompous and often overly-casual. I found it grating and had to take breaks while reading, but other readers may not find the tone as troublesome as I did.

The authors synthesize a truly impressive amount of information, and they are good at spotting patterns. Even if you do not accept that all the murders are connected, they have still done an excellent job of creating a narrative out of killings previously regarded as unconnected. Their conclusion about the killer's identity is very far-fetched, but, still, it's very interesting.

Be wary of pieces of information that are merely speculation on the authors' part. They often assert things as likely to be true, and it's easy to forget they don't actually have verifiable information to back up a particular claim. They seem to run into a problem that will be familiar to fans of historical true crime: after a point, there's a lot we will never know, and things devolve into speculation.

If you find speculation interesting (as I do), this book could be very interesting. It could have been better-written, and it's missing some key features that could have made it a better and more reader-friendly book. ( )

The murders were interesting but the would have liked the murders to be discussed chronologically or by relevance. This was all over the place, with random info sprinkled in, and a lot of guessing and speculation. ( )

Atrocious writing on an interesting subject. I finished it but wish I would have spent that time on another book. ( )