Women Who Kill: A Look into a Look into Female Serial Killers

by Tyler C.

    

"Women Who Kill" is a non-fiction book that details 14 different serial killers, each with their own chapters. As the name implies, all of the serial killers thoroughly described are women. They fall into different classifications: "Question of Sanity", "Black Widow", "Revenge", "Angel of Death", "Team Killers", "Profit or Crime", "Sexual Predator", and "Unexplained and Unsolved". They also describe their apparent motives: gain, jealousy, revenge, elimination, lust, conviction, and thrill. These are written and described toward the end of the book. They definitely don't skimp on the details of these women.

According to chapter 14 of the book, this story was written because the "reality of the female serial killer has never entered popular consciousness in the way that the male serial killer has". And I feel that's a great reason: I definitely got some strange looks while reading this book in public. It's an unorthodox topic that also manages to be so incredibly interesting. Though there are a spelling and grammatical errors, they did not take me out of the immersion of the story. This book, filled with emotion and confusion, kept me interested from start to finish.

The last two chapters of the story aren't in the traditional way that the others are written, rather being about the individual types of women and theories about why women might kill respectively. Why are the details of the individual types of women, brought up in every chapter about each individual killer, toward the end of the "story"?  This would be more acceptable if it was in a separate section from the chapters of the story, but it's not: it's the second to last chapter. I feel that this could have been done in a more effective way, such as putting this as the very first chapter to avoid any confusion to the reader. It's rather strange to read about somebody being a certain type of killer when they likely don't know what that "type" means.

The way the chapters about their respective killers are arranged is something I can appreciate, however. The story begins with less-detailed, more simple chapters in comparison to the more complex chapters toward the end that include more details for the curious sort. For example, the very first chapter is only five pages long, with the 14th chapter being twenty pages long- four times larger in size. I like this because it eases you into the way each chapter will be arranged very nicely, making the story seem less daunting to me than most. The pacing never felt too slow in the longer chapters, either: they are filled with relevant information about their respective killer that very rarely feels like filler to read.

Overall, I feel that this story could appeal to anybody in my age group or higher if they give it a chance, given they can handle graphic language and situations including a morbid amount of death and some heavy sexual implications. However, it felt like it was in good taste, using these details to describe the seriousness of the killer's actions. It's not very long, weighing in at 261 pages of not-so-small but not-so-big text. I recommend giving it a try.

This book can be found on Amazon (online and offline), Google books, in libraries, and in your local book store.

Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers, by Carol Anne Davis, A & B Publishers Group, June 20, 2011, 269 pages