Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

Today’s Nonfiction post is on Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History by Tori Telfer. It is 366 pages long and is published by Harper Perennial. The cover is white with different objects like knives, bottles of poison, and drawings of some of the lady killers. The intended reader is someone who is interested in serial killers, true crime, untold history, and women’s history. There is foul language, talk of sex, and violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”
Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.
Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.

Review- An interesting read about macabre subject. Telfer loves her subject and it shows in this book, it makes the topic so much fun to have someone who loves serial killers to write about them. I love true crime, murder, and other dark morbid things so this book was a win for me. We travel all over the world, in different times, and explore the different reasons for the crimes that these lady killers committed. Telfer does not make the women more sympathetic because most of them are definitely killers; but she makes them more understandable. Some of the women had no hope or were trapped in impossible situations but then we have the ones that did just like to kill. Killing made their life goals easier and so they killed and killed again and again. I hope that Telfer comes back to this subject because she has the right touch for this material and a good writing style. I enjoyed this book and I would love to read more from Telfer.

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.