There is little more terrifying than those who hunt, stalk and snatch their prey under the cloak of darkness. These hunters search not for animals, but for the touch, taste, and empowerment of human flesh. They are cannibals, vampires and monsters, and they walk among us. These serial killers are not mythical beasts with horns and shaggy hair. They are people living among society, going about their day to day activities until nightfall. They are the Dennis Rader’s, the fathers, husbands, church going members of the community. This A-Z encyclopedia of 150 serial killers is the ideal reference book. Included are the most famous true crime serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez, and not to mention the women who kill, such as Aileen Wuornos and Martha Rendell. There are also lesser known serial killers, covering many countries around the world, so the range is broad. Each of the serial killer files includes information on when and how they killed the victims, the background of each killer, or the suspects in some cases such as the Zodiac killer, their trials and punishments. For some there are chilling quotes by the killers themselves. The Big Book of Serial Killers is an easy to follow collection of information on the world’s most heinous murderers.
The reason why I read this book wasn’t that I was interested in actually reading it, but I got this book as a gift from someone and since I already had it on my TBR bookshelf I decided to go ahead and finally read it after this book had laid on the shelf for a better part of 2 years. Its also important to say that I had DNF-ed this book after having read 150 pages of it or so.
To be honest in this review I gotta say that I had quite a few issues with this book, and I will explain all of my issues with this book of course right here in this review.
The main thing which annoyed me the most about this book is that this book contains false information about the cases or serial killers it talks about. Those false information doesn’t happen often but they do happen a fair share of times during this book. I personally think that if you gonna write a book about a true crime cases then the author should at the very least double check the dates, victim names, and other relevant information before printing and publishing the book.
The second thing which annoyed me a lot, was the very bad grammar in this book. As some of you may know from being around my website for a while, English isn’t my native language but even I noticed the very bad grammar in this book. Which really in my opinion says a lot about how bad the grammar is for someone who’s second language is English to notice the bad grammar.
This book is supposed to be a encyclopedia that gives an overview of each killer but the problem with that it focuses very little time into each killer and by doing that it gives us a bare minimum of information and details about each killer which doesn’t make this book be a “encyclopedia”. To be honest you can learn more about each case if you just watch a 5 minute YouTube video about each killer.
The tone of this book is also very bad because it feels like written by someone in the 5th or 6th grade. Because of the many spelling or grammatical errors which happen over and over again in this book.
From what I have seen on Goodreads, Jack Rosewood had written a fair share of true crime books about real like serial killers. Which doesn’t look good for me after reading this book. Because there are so many things a experienced writer like him wouldn’t do, but it was done anyways in this book.
I personally have been interested in the topic of serial killers, so I have some kind of knowledge about the majority of people discussed this book. And to be very honest here, you can find much better sources on the internet which do much better job covering the cases than this book does.
There are a lot of printing errors in this book too. Which really annoyed me because the layout of this book would change every couple of pages or chapters which really made me confused. Because if the author spend x amount of hours researching the cases and writing about them, why wouldn’t he spend a few more hours making sure that the layout of this book is the same from front to back ?
It almost feels like there was no published or editor having a look on this book before actually printing and selling the copies of this book. Which really blows my mind because at this point I have read hundreds of books and this book is the first one I came across which have the stupidest mistakes which could have been avoided.
So after reading this book, or trying to read it, I gotta say that this book isn’t worth the time nor the money you will spend on it. Because it gives the reader the bare minimum about each case and it is filled with errors that really should be avoided when you are about to publish a book.
I Give This Book 1 / 5
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