Butcher's Work

A quartet of gripping historical true-crime narratives

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of US crime, a nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children, a Gilded Age "Bluebeard" who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country, and a decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.

While other infamous homicides from the same eras-the Lizzie Borden slayings, for example, or the "thrill killing" committed by Leopold and Loeb-have entered into our cultural mythology, these four equally sensational crimes have largely faded from public memory.

Butcher's Work restores these once-notorious cases to vivid, dramatic life.