I am in the middle of a great book by (of all people) baseball writer Bill James and his daughter. The book looks at a series of murders that took place for about 20 years from the 1900s to the late 1910s.

First, it is a great, well-written read and I recommend it. The author does a good job of rendering real the world of rural 1910 America. The murderer struck small towns with no local police force. He rode trains to quickly get in or out of town and chose his victims by random. The author has an informal but academically rigorous style.

I am struck by how much times have changed in the years, with the rise of CSI and true crime novels. Back then, people did not know anything about this sort of thing. So when it happened to their town, they could not even begin to comprehend that the murders were done by someone who killed randomly. It just had to be from someone in the community. This led to lynchings, false imprisonments, and trials.

The book shows some really impressive sleuthing especially the parsing through the thousands of articles and news items released during the time period. Some of these news papers I have never heard of before in my whole life. In addition, they took great care to track their sources, note differences and conflicts, and in general keep organized.

At the end, the book makes a declaration of who committed the murders. Their reasoning is a bit tenuous to me especially considering I saw some possible avenues to try and confirm their assertion (which were never addressed) but otherwise I enjoyed reading the whole thing. It was a bodice-ripping (literally) tale from the start to the finish and I am glad that I picked it up.