The best books about Serial killers

Geyer describes the painstaking work he did over two months in 1895 as the lone detective on a highly challenging case. He’d recently lost his wife and daughter in a fire, but he set out to find the missing children of Benjamin Pitezel, a man just murdered by the notorious serial killer, H. H. Holmes. The difficulty of this investigation lay not just in the killer’s clever maneuvers but also in the many places he’d taken the children and the different names he’d adopted to accomplish his dirty deeds. Holmes might have killed and discarded the children anywhere along his circuitous route. This book demonstrates the best work of a master detective. Geyer used the most tenuous leads to develop more. Some lead to dead ends, while others sent hm in a productive direction. Since reporters covered his journey from town to town, he enlisted them to elicit interest from… show more.

Belle Sorrenson Gunness is a rare female serial killer who was exceptionally predatory. This Norwegian-American had insured her first husband and two of her children before killing them in the early 1900s to enrich herself. She bought a pig farm in LaPorte, Indiana, which she soon turned into her personal graveyard. The twice-widowed Belle published matrimonial ads, and those men who answered arrived, one after another, before each disappeared. She’d warned them not to reveal where they were going, but Andrew Helgelein did. When Andrew’s brother announced he was coming to look for him, Belle’s six-year spree abruptly ended in a house fire in which she seemed to have perished. A search of the property produced bodies and body parts. Before it was over, an estimated twelve to thirteen sets of remains had been removed from the ground. Schechter vivdly describes this case every step of the way, and dispels… show more.

John Douglas and I were FBI Agents during the same time period. He is the Bureau’s criminal profiling pioneer specializing in serial killers and was a member of its Investigative Support Unit while I was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Squad. Currently, I am an Adjunct Professor in the Criminal Justice Program at a Community College in Oregon. In curriculum courses that include aggression and violence my resources emphasize books written by both Douglas and Olshaker for their thoroughness and true crime exposure of those sick minds of the criminal subjects. I was personally involved in the investigation of one of the most wanted serial killers, Ted Kaczynski, aka, Unabomber, and can vouch for the difficulty in solving these cases.

Supernatural Thrillers: Every Dead Thing by John Connolly is the first novel in Connolly’s Charlie Parker series (it contains Parker’s origin story). If you like your thrillers with a blood-curdling slice of the supernatural, run, don’t walk, to the nearest bookstore and pick up this novel. Haunted by his dead wife and daughter, Parker is an ex-cop turned private detective. And the cases Parker works—Good Lord!—best sleep with the lights on. Though John Connolly’s an Irish lad, his Parker novels take place along the East Coast (Parker lives in Portland, Maine). You’ll realize how literary and poetic Connolly’s prose is as the hairs on the back of your neck begin to rise and you refuse to investigate that sound you just heard coming from the basement.

The novels of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith are obvious descendants of this one. All three writers have insight and descriptive power that allow you to see, feel and inhabit some disturbing forms of human psychopathology. Hughes' female characters are strong, clear-eyed, and wise. They're the drivers of the story, not the victims. All her characters are fully drawn, and the tension builds consistently throughout. It's a hard book to put down, and you continue to feel it even after you've finished it.

Sarah Temple has ended her relationship with an abusive boyfriend and is now stuck in a dingy apartment living next to some very peculiar people. When her ex is unsuccessful in his attempt at reconciliation, he hooks up with her neighbor. Several days later he emerges as a strange new man. Sarah decides to investigate. And so the adventure begins.

Sometimes extreme horror stories fall short because the authors just want to shock and disgust readers. That’s fine for some, I suppose. But when an author can create a truly good, horrific story and make it disturbing, to boot, It’s a truly winning combination. Harvey Click does just that in The Bad Box. This story is creepy, suspenseful, mysterious, full of action, gory, imaginative, and masterfully written with rich, descriptive language and great imagery:

"A stench of damp dirt and worms and fungus and rotting animals belched up from… show more.

Wrath is truly the king of extreme horror and this is his best book. The over the top sex and violence will leave you traumatized in this tale of a cannibalistic serial killer. At times erotic and at times disgusting, this book at no point bores the reader and is a good introduction to an amazing writer.

This book blew my mind when I first read it. In my opinion, it is one of the most visceral, scary, and under-rated serial killer novels of all time. Published in 1986 in the midst of America’s much-hyped real and fictional serial killer ‘epidemic,’ Killer on the Road stands out as a first-person serial-killer narrative, as well as putting forward a new kind of character (for the 1980s) – the homosexual serial murderer. In this novel, Ellroy delves into the phenomenon of motiveless serial murder from the perspective of the killer on a subversive journey through a hellish suburban America. From the prologue to the epilogue the reader is presented an interior world-view saturated with violence and nightmarish insights into the psychopathology of a disturbed killer. 

John is a teenager who is starting to work in his family’s business, which is a mortuary. He is concerned about how much he enjoys being around death, and worries that he might be a sociopath. His concerns take a back seat when a murdering demon comes to town and John’s the only one who seems to know what is happening. A surprisingly warm and engaging book, given the subject matter. It’s also been made into a film.