The Mammoth Book of The History of Murder by Colin Wilson

 Started: 2/7/21

Finished: 5/27/21

Pages: 639

Year: 2000 (this edition)

Genre: True Crime

Grade: B

Reason for reading: grabbed off TBR pile

Type: paperback

Blurb (from back cover): "Following the original success of his history of homicide, The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2, expert author Colin Wilson has prepared this new, completely revised edition, bringing the chronicle of this most dreadful of crimes right up to the present.

"He examines the motives and methods, both of particular categories of murder and of individual and mysterious cases. Starting with the horrifying entertainments of Ancient Rome, and moving on through the centuries, he illuminates such infamous figures as Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Gilles de Rais, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory and the Marques de Sade, Elizabethan executions, Jacobean with hunts, the gaslit Victorian underworld of Jack the Ripper, and the gangland killings of the Jazz Age lead us up to the serial killers of the modern world, among them Fred West, Chikatilo, Milat, and Jeffrey Dahmer, gruesome cannibal killers and random 'spree' gunmen, as well as the growing phenomenon of murder with an element of the occult"

Opinion: An interesting collection of true crime stories. Some a lot of people will recognize. Some are not as well known. Interesting look at the history.