Even if you’re skeptical of Fraser’s thesis, her book is often riveting. She has a terrific eye for telling — and, usually, horrifying — details.

Unique ... She makes the unconventional argument that the rise of serial killing has deep roots in the creation of industrial waste. The connection isn’t as far-fetched as it may appear ... Setting up a tripartite structure of murder, industrial history, and memoir is a complicated task. Fraser comes close to pulling it off, as Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. But in casting about for a grand unified theory connecting serial murder to a larger environmental phenomenon, Fraser falls into a trap ... Although Fraser does her damnedest to avoid it, Bundy repeatedly steals focus from the muck of smelter waste. Perhaps it’s inevitable that systemic, slow-motion violence feels less dramatic than individuals killing individuals ... There is value in seeing a bigger picture, and I’m glad to have followed the threads that Fraser unspooled. But there is equal, if not greater, value in accepting what we don’t, and can’t, know.

Did this environment also create serial killers? The lead-crime hypothesis can only extend so far ... A perhaps more reliable commonality, which Ms. Fraser details in her meticulously researched book, is that the killers all grew up poor, unwanted and themselves brutalized ... A great writer can make art of the most grotesque material, and Ms. Fraser does. As crushing as many of the stories are, we are held in thrall. Still, Murderland is not for the weak of stomach. Discovering the sheer number of victims, and the viciousness with which they were killed, can be as unsettling for the reader as it was for those charged with searching for bodies ... In a climate where killers can be romanticized, Ms. Fraser performs the necessary service of showing them as the troubled, pathetic and deeply dangerous people they are.

Initially, Murderland seems as crazy as the killers it portrays. But Fraser...has the skills to pull it off, and once she gets going, the theory she espouses seems plausible.

A blend of memoir, biography and history ... Reads like a true crime thriller ... All of this is grim stuff, although Fraser handles it in a non-queasy way. She can’t prove that industrial lead was the culprit and there are other obvious explanations for the rise in serial killing ... But Fraser does build a compelling theory.

While the lead-crime hypothesis is provocative, Murderland provides limited substantive evidence to support causality between lead exposure and violent crime in the 1970s ... One wishes Fraser had devoted more pages to exposing corporate criminals such as Woodruff and Pinto than to better-known serial killers such as Bundy and his ilk.

Unrelentingly bleak and impassioned ... The product of vast research into the correlation between violent behavior and neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants (lead, asbestos, arsenic) in the blood, it is an amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and a startlingly candid memoir of Fraser’s girlhood in the Seattle area in 'the time of serial killers'—both individual and corporate. Its theme is simple and terrible enough to be repeated time and again through four-hundred-plus pages: 'More lead, more murder' ... It is Fraser’s strategy to bring these revelations together and to hammer home what has been known but too easily forgotten ... Though Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner. Folded into the charges against corporate polluters like ASARCO are passages that fairly spring off the page ... Within the dense pages of Murderland such memoirist passages are appended, sometimes rather awkwardly, to the book’s less personal concerns. They glitter like small precious gems within a slag heap of ugliness, giving us fleeting glimpses of a precocious child, a girl, a young woman coming of age in the 1960s ... It might be said that devotees of true crime are as familiar with his sordid life story as devotees of boxing are with the triumphant life story of Muhammad Ali—must it be recounted yet again? And at such length, with such unsparing details? Fraser seems to think so, reimagining Bundy’s rape-murder sprees in a sort of hyperventilating prose, providing a painstakingly precise record disproportionate to the larger project of Murderland, and often quick-cutting to the rape-murder sprees of Bundy’s contemporaries Dennis Rader, Richard Ramirez, the Zodiac Killer, and the Green River Killer at exhaustive length. If the thesis of Murderland is that there’s a lethal connection between environmental contamination and violent crime, it is probably not necessary to evoke sexual-sadistic murders one by one or to appear to be vicariously reliving Bundy’s most thrilling moments ... Fraser evokes Bundy’s acts as if in a dreamlike present in which the scrim between author and subject vanishes as in a David Lynch film of surreal yet becalmed nightmare ... Rarely has a true crime chronicler entered so ardently into the imagined consciousness of her subject ... In speaking boastfully of himself in various interviews, Bundy was never so eloquent as Fraser in describing his actions.

Isn’t merely convincing; it’s downright damning, showing how lead seeped into literally every aspect of life for those who lived near a smelter ... A narrative that is gripping, harrowing, and timely.

She creates a distinctive true crime offering, melding accounts of notorious murderers with historical and cultural happenings ... Detailed, mesmerizing ... True crime fans will find Murderland a ravenous read.

Provocative, eerily lyrical ... A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense.

Eye-brow raising ... This is a provocative and page-turning work of true crime.