Extreme Killers: Tales of the World’s Most Prolific Serial Killers

Spanning the centuries, Newton (Doctor Death) focuses on 15 serial killers in this harrowing survey. True crime fans will be familiar with the likes of Gilles De Rais (aka Bluebeard), who raped and murdered 140 boys in France in the 1400s, and the modern-day Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to more than 500 murders. But Newton also covers lesser known but no less vicious killers, such as Pakistan’s Javed Iqbal, who murdered 100 children over six months in 1999 and dissolved their bodies in vats of acid. And then there are the women: Erzsébet Báthory, the so-called Blood Countess of Hungary, who tortured to death an estimated 80 girls in 1610, and Madame Fazekas, who led a widow cult in rural Hungary that poisoned more than 100 soldiers returning from WWI to wives who didn’t want them back. Other killers used their professions to further their crimes, such as Britain’s Harold Shipman, a doctor who in the 1970s murdered as many as 250 patients, though he was convicted of murdering only 15, and Russian policeman Mikhail Popkov, who lured dozens of women into his police car and then murdered them and raped their corpses. Straightforward prose reveals the depths of human depravity. This isn’t a book for the faint of heart. (Oct.)