An Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime, this "impressive...open-eyed investigative inquiry wrapped within a cultural history of rural America" (The Wall Street Journal) shows legendary statistician and baseball writer Bill James applying his analytical acumen to crack an unsolved century-old mystery surrounding one of the deadliest Serial killers in American history. "A beautifully written and extraordinarily researched narrative..
James shows how these cultural factors enabled such an unspeakable series of crimes to occur, and his groundbreaking approach to true crime will convince skeptics, amaze aficionados, and change the way we view criminal history. "A suspenseful historical account" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), The Man from the Train paints a vivid, psychologically perceptive portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, when crime was regarded as a local problem, and opportunistic private detectives exploited a dysfunctional judicial system.
Then after sifting through thousands of local newspapers, court transcripts, and public records, he and his daughter Rachel made an astonishing discovery: they learned the true identity of this monstrous criminal and uncovered one of the deadliest Serial killers in America.
Applying the same know-how he brings to his legendary baseball analysis, he empirically determined which crimes were committed by the same person.
When celebrated true crime expert Bill James first learned about these horrors, he began to investigate others that might fit the same pattern.
And fewer still would realize that all of these families lived within walking distance to a train station.
Few people believed the crimes were related.
But Most incidents went alMost unnoticed outside the communities in which they occurred.
Some of these cases--like the infamous Villisca, Iowa, murders--received national attention.
Between 1898 and 1912, families across the country were bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt side of an axe.
An Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime, this "impressive...open-eyed investigative inquiry wrapped within a cultural history of rural America" (The Wall Street Journal) shows legendary statistician and baseball writer Bill James applying his analytical acumen to crack an unsolved century-old mystery surrounding one of the deadliest Serial killers in American history
