Alas, this book was archived before I got chance to read it.

This is a compulsively readable, historical, true-crime novel. In it we follow the author as he lays out the case for a serial killer who traveled around the US in the early 1900s, and killed people with axes along the way. The most well known potential case is that of the Villisca Axe Murders wherein an entire family was killed in their home, in Villisca, Iowa. The author's thesis is that this was not an isolated event and he lays out in a very measured and methodical way the reasons why he believes this to be just one of the murders committed by a prolific serial killer who traveled by train from place to place killing people. He doesn't sensationalize the crimes and also readily admits that we, the readers, must form our own opinion from the information that he provides. If you like true-crime this is a great book to pick up.
I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Historical crime is one of my favorite genres but I had a difficult time getting through this book. The authors clearly did an immense amount of research, and I have much respect for the time and effort they put into this project. Unfortunately, I found the book dull, tedious, and disorganized.

The writing style is a lot of telling but little showing. I didn't feel any of the emotions this type of story could elicit. The narrative is more like your friend sits you down to tell you a long, meandering bunch of facts he strings together in a haphazard way.

The authors use two tactics throughout the book that I found irritating. First, they tell us all about incidents that have no bearing on 'the man from the train' case at all, and they would immediately tell you so. Sometimes the story would be gossip from the specific area, and other times it would be another murder case that has similarities but is definitely unrelated. These stories only served as distractions, further complicating an already complicated timeline. Second, the authors have an unfortunate tendency to give small bits of information about a case or person in one chapter, then tell us we'll get more detail in a later chapter. These scattered tidbits and teasers add to the disorganized feel of the narrative.

Putting this book together was certainly a massive undertaking. For me, though, the result reads too much like an impassioned amateur's creation.

I didn't finish the book -- but I wanted to give feedback. My library will be purchasing this title, and I'll be purchasing a personal copy. I sometimes find it hard to read on my iPad, and this was really great from what I did get finished. Thank you for letting me read it early!

The Man from the Train by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James is subtitled The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery. I chose this book mainly for the link to the Villasca axe murders. Imagine my surprise when some of the murders happened in my own southern state. The writing style is much different from most non-fiction books, but in this instance it works. I felt like the authors are sitting down with me and telling me a story. The book is very well researched. I appreciated how the authors were honest in saying when certain murders did not match or only might match the criteria of the serial killer. I was impressed with the ending of the book. The authors convinced me that they had correctly identified the killer. This book is easily on my list of top ten books for this year.

The Man from the Train is a non-fiction review of a series of murders starting in 1898 and not ending until 1912, if indeed they did end then. The authors are a father and daughter team, Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James. The authors make a case for a series of murders to be connected. They then connect them to one man. Looking at the information they present, it is possible but the storytelling is disorganized and lacks the punch of cohesive story.

This book really did not draw me in as much as I had hoped. I really enjoy non-fiction, especially historical events. Erik Larson, author of Isaac’s Storm and Dead Wake among others, is a writer who captures the reader’s attention and keeps it. I could not help but compare Larson’s style to the James’s style while reading The Man from the Train and found the James’s wanting.

I cannot include any quotes in this review because I only have the Advance Review Copy and not the final published copy. There may be differences which is why the publishers stipulates not quoting from the ARC. If I could include quotes, I could easily illustrate what I mean by the James’s style. What I can say is that several places the authors give information then immediately say it has no bearing and is included just to show the local gossip concerning the murders. In other places, information is teased and then the reader is told more on that topic will be found in a later chapter. I found these devices to distract from the follow of the narrative. I never found myself truly engaged in the storytelling.

I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
On June 10, 1912, the town of Villisca, Iowa woke up to a grisly scene. Josiah Moore, his wife Sarah, their four children Herman, Katherine, Boyd, and Paul, and two of Katherine’s friends: Lena and Ida were found brutally murdered in heir beds. Someone had broken into the home, murdered them with the blunt side of an ax while they slept, then left-locking up the house behind him, and disappeared, never to be caught.
The Villisca Ax Murders are fairly well known, even today. But these murders were just one of several unsolved ax murders that took place in the early 20th century. Over a hundred years later, baseball statistician Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James set off to unravel a century of facts, newspaper articles, and police reports to not only identify the killer-“The Man From the Train”, but to also link together multiple murders from across the country.
I was familiar with the Villisca Ax Murders, so I was skeptical of the authors’ claim. Over one hundred years had passed since the last of the Man From the Train’s victims had died. No one had ever caught him. And how could one person brutally murdered so many people? So, I began The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Mystery not expecting to be convinced. Instead, I was taken by surprise, ending the book completely swayed to the James’ theory.
The research that went into the Man From the Train was astonishing. The James had to shift through hundreds of news articles, court documents, and evidence, which they then had to filter through to discover basic facts. What emerges is a very convincing picture of a mass ax murderer loose in early 20th century America.
A lot was going on in The Man From the Train, with multiple people and places being referenced in each chapter. This got a little confusing. Additionally, I struggled to keep up with the towns and counties mentioned. The majority of the murders took place in small towns and unincorporated communities; if you aren’t familiar with them, they are difficult to place. I think a map would have helped with this.
I’m not familiar with Bill James’s other books, so the tone and the unrelated asides sprinkled throughout the book may be his normal writing style. Personally, I found it to be aggravating. At times, his tone was so sarcastic and brusque the it seemed like he was being disrespectful to the murder victims. I don’t think that James was being disrespectful, but it did annoy me. As the book progressed, the tone either changed or I no longer noticed it because of how caught up in the book I was.
The Man From the Train is very engaging. I was eager to find out what each chapter held. The argument presented in the book is thorough, with plenty of facts to back it up. I especially appreciated that the authors avoided gore. The murders were all incredibly gory, but this is not played up or laid out in minute detail.
The Man From the Train will appeal to a diverse audience: armchair historians, true crime aficionados, and those interested in the modern, paranormal history of the Villisca Ax Murders. It is an engaging , well researched book that certainly convinced me with its argument,

If you are new to true crime, this is a great book to start. If you are a longtime fan, you won't be disappointed either. The Man from the Train, by Bill and Rachel James, is a heart-pounding, yet humorous study on a presumed serial killer whose crimes have been unsolved for over a hundred years. For years, I had been a fan of Bill James and his pioneering of baseball statistics. Although this is not his first foray into true crime, it gives him a chance to use his research and analytical skills to attempt to solve this century-old murder. The amount of research the father and daughter team complete is just astounding. Despite working with biased and incomplete primary sources, they are able to compile a laundry list of crimes with several similarities that lead to a certain conclusion. It is only fair to allow you to discover that conclusion, as the authors are very careful not to lead in one way or another. They state their conclusions clearly, but want the reader to arrive at their own in due course. They are upfront when presenting both information as fact and information as conjecture. Finally, the book is actually hilarious, or as hilarious as a book about an axe murderer could be. If you are familiar with Bill James' work on baseball statistics, you are probably familiar with his distinctive voice. The tone is almost conversational, addressing the reader directly, joking casually about incompetent law enforcement, or openly criticizing racist accusations of the early 20th century America. Not that they don't take the story seriously, but the authors make light when they can, surely appreciated in this gruesome, tragic story.

I requested this from NetGalley because I find true crime fascinating and I read that the author is a baseball statistician so I was hoping that this is a book that uses data to solve the crime. Unfortunately, while the cases are extremely tragic and told in a fascinating way, the book suffers from a lack of focus.

So from around 1900 to 1912, a series of murders started to take place near railway lines. All of them were senseless, cruel murders which had a few points in common - such as an axe being a weapon, no robbery, no warning, and a few more. The authors are convinced that this is the work of one man, something that the press only seemed to realise a few years after the murders start (and by then a few people had been convicted for the murders).

While I do agree that the there was probably a serial on the loose, I'm not really satisfied with the arguments made. There are sentences like "No source says so, but the Meadows family had to have hunting dogs; I just can't see a family like this not having hunting dogs" (used when hypothesising how the crime might have taken place) which are quite scary because I would not want anyone to assume things that cannot be proven as fact.

Plus I was expecting a more mathematical look at the crime and the closest that the book came to maths was to ask how many murders would one expect there to be with the characteristics of the crime and say "the mathematical answer is 0."

I don't know if I'm remembering my stats wrong but while the answer may by very close to zero, I wouldn't have expected an answer like this. I did expect the author to calculate the probability of such a case happening and then derive the number of murders so a flat out "answer is 0" with no working made me disappointed.

Narrative-wise, the book basically goes through all related crimes and only discusses the probable murder at the end. This is probably a personal preference but I wish only the relevant cases were discussed. There are a lot of murders as it is, and to read something horrific and then see something along the lines of "but we don't think this was part of the serial killing" feels like there wasn't much thought into what should have ended up in the book.

As for the murderer, he seems to have been identified with a gut feeling because all I saw was an account of his 'first case' which was like all the others. Not much else was presented to show how he was linked to the murders, although the authors did theorise that he's behind a gruesome killing in Kaifeck a few years later.

This book also has one of the strongest authorial voices that I've read and I suppose it's so that we end up believing what the author believes. I suppose whether you like or dislike the book will also depend a lot on whether you like the authorial voice and how heavy it was. Personally, I'm not a fan of the puns and the digressions but it didn't make me want to stop reading the book.

Basically, this book introduced me to this horrific crime that I never knew existed. I do agree with the authors that this was the work of a serial killer, but I'm not a fan of how the case was made and I'm not entirely convinced that the man that they fingered is the real culprit (although he did commit a terrible murder too). It's too bad that the book didn't use much maths to make a case - that would have been interesting.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.

A gripping narration from an excellent author, statistics have never been so exciting or terrifying. Using modern methods of modelling and analysis to solve an infamous killing spree, this book not only gives us insight into the power of numbers, but also takes us on an unmissable journey into the heart of 19th of century America, with all its fears, social anxieties, and superstitions.

The Man from the Train is an investigative/journalistic enquiry into the murders that happened about a hundred years back in America. The main focus of the period is 1898 to 1912 when the infamous Man from the Train murdered about 100+ members approximately across the wide swaths of the rural countryside. The book is a fascinating read about life that existed in America during the early twentieth century. The book contains nuggets of knowledge interspersed among the text. For e.g. I came to know that the founder of Rice University -- WIlliam Rice was murdered and the University was named after Rice; It was the obligation of the common people to catch the criminals and hand them over to the police. The author has painfully explained how he and his daughter sifted through volumes of data to arrive at the identification of the murderer. The key focus of the book is on the concept of irrational skepticism which makes people not believe in a fact that may be correct and possible and which leads to incorrect decisions. During the early part of the twentieth century, communication among the different parts of the country was limited and the murderer took advantage of this fact and kept shifting his location while committing the murders across the vast landscape. The author finally also gives a mathematical probability of how and why he zeroed in on the identity of the murderer. Given the fact that these incidents occurred about a hundred years ago, it is quite difficult to sift through the data that may not exist now to arrive at the conclusion. Hence, it is commendable that the author and his daughter spent significant time to meticulously document all the details of the various murder incidents that occurred during that period. However, a notes section containing the bibliography would have helped to add further credence to the conclusion that was arrived over a period of time. A good read to know about how people managed their lives during the early part of the twentieth century, history and occupation of the early settlers of the twentieth century and how racism, ignorance, lack of communication, irrational skepticism and other factors ensured that the murderer could rear his ugly head time and again at will without getting caught by the inept police at that time. This was also the precursor for the modern FBI that was created much later.

On June 9th, 1912, eight people, a family of six and two children visiting for the night, were murdered with the blunt side of an axe. The murder of eight people, six of them children under 12 years of age, rocked the small farming town of Vilisca, Iowa. But the Moore family were simply the latest victims of this violent perpetrator. Someone with an axe to grind (sorry, I really, truly couldn't help myself) was traveling across the breadth of the country at the turn of the twentieth century, and leaving piles of corpses in his wake . . .

Bill James is a baseball guy. Specifically he is a baseball statistician, and he approaches this topic with a mathematical mindset. After all, the Vilisca murders, considered to be one of the most infamous unsolved mass murders in US history, are tentatively considered to be part of a series of serial killings at the turn of the twentieth century, but James expands on the widely accepted dimensions of the serial killer's crimes. Rather than the several crimes most ascribe to the killer, James posits that the man from the train began his cross-country murder spree as early as 1898, and may be responsible for over one hundred murders.

Such a claim often precedes eye rolling and offers of tin-foil hats, but in this book, James provides the reader with carefully researched and sourced data to back up his assertions. Using newspaper records from across the country, combined with modern profiling techniques, James has unearthed a truly startling number of mass murders like the one in Vilisca. Like any good historian, James is careful to use primary sources where possible, and to document where the data available clash with his hypothesis. While several similar crimes are dismissed out of hand as being tied to our suspect, James makes quite a strong argument for adding several more murders to the ones traditionally ascribed.

Fans of history and true crime (lovers of Devil in the White City take note) should enjoy this book. But the casual reader need not despair. James' writing style is accessible and engaging, and replete with dark humor and some truly monstrous puns.

An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Bill James, controversial baseball writer and statistician, has written a book, “The Man from the Train,” about solving a serial killer mystery. It would be fair to ask what a man with James’ background in baseball knows about solving a 100-year old mystery replete with axe slayings and sexual perversion by an invisible man? Or maybe a better question would be, why?

His background of assembling massive amounts of data is obvious and James answers the question of why in the preface to his study. After reading an account of a notorious Iowa family massacre over a hundred years ago, he had the thought that there must be other incidents that could be linked to the same murderer.

Using the miracle of computers, he and his daughter, Rachel, uncovered scores of others in which, as an aftermath, people had been executed, lynched, and rotted in prison as perpetrators of the crimes. In reality, according to their conclusions, a single Man from the Train committed the horrific crimes. They even identify the mad man, name him, and track his movements as he jumps off trains to commit mayhem and back on to disappear.

The James gang, using their talent for researching and assembling data from hundreds thousands of small–town newspapers and sketchy police and court records, produce the results covered in their book. Their tenacity for sifting together and melding tremendous mounds of raw statistics into a sound and reliable conclusion is evident.

James has a unique writing style. He’s persuasive, witty, somewhat whimsical, and definitely convinced he’s right in his conclusions. That sometimes makes his treatise slightly airy and sarcastic. His attitude is, “Here’s what we found. You can believe it or move along to another topic or book.” I believe it, have followed along, and now have knowledge of something I never heard of.

I find the final murderous episode in far-off Germany, some ten years after the end of the United States episodes, somewhat incredulous and far-reaching, but this is his book and I‘ve bought into his conclusions.

My thanks to NetGalley, Bill James and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The Man From the Train reads like an investigative record....because it is! The research of homicides at the turn of the last century is extraordinary. It is interesting to note how a crime is "solved" without ballistic testing or forensic work: hearsay, unreliable witnesses, gut instincts of the accusers. Lynchings were common. Guilt by loose association, and definitely guilt unless one could prove their innocence. Fascinating and enlightening! It is a factual accounting of an undetected serial killer that recent research has exposed.. If you like reading a fact-based litany of the research into true crime and murders, then this book is for you. It is a laborious read due to the technical aspect. A LOT of information and details are thrown at the reader , and it is difficult to absorb it all. Furthermore, there are so many people mentioned ( some that are completely irrelevant to this book) that is becomes overwhelming and somewhat confusing. I believe I prefer historical fiction rather than textbook-like facts that slowly and methodically build a serial killer case. Again, it was very informative and enlightening!

This is quite an amazing dig into a long series of killings that include the Villisca murders, along with a whole lot of others that appear to be connected going both before and after that time. Bill James and his daughter Rachel did great research and this book is the bloody and frightening result. Read it and see what you think. Did "The Man From The Train" commit this series of twisted killings with such a distinct pattern to most of them? True crime, mystery and history lovers will be intrigued by this. My thanks to NetGalley, Scribner, and the authors, for providing me with a Kindle ARC for review.

Well written investigation, a fascinating story, a little repetitive in parts, would recommend

I received a free Kindle copy of The Man from the Train by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James courtesy of Net Galley and Scribner,  the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review to Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my history book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book as the description sounded very interesting. It is the first book by the authors that I have read.

The subtitle, The Solving of a Century Old Serical Killer Mystery, is an adequate description of the book. It is a rather dull read due to the writing approach of the authors presenting the material in an almost "Joe Friday" format from the Dragnet television series (I know I am showing my age). Another slightly annoying detail is the authors briefly discussing a crime and then telling the reader that it will be covered in more detail in chapter xxx. They also included murders that were not part of the pattern or associated with individual that they identified as the serial killer. Again, I ask why include it other than fill pages.

In summary, this book just did not grab me or engage me. It is unfortunate becaus I had high hopes for the book. I will say that others have given it rave reviews on Goodreads so they must have found value in the book that I did not.

I was given an advance copy of the book from NetGalley in order to give my unbiased review.

WOW! What a compelling read! I read this story in 4 days.....and 3 of those were work days.

Bill James lays out a compelling tale that was painstakingly researched and seems to have solved a centuries old mystery. It is well written and gruesomely realistic. More disturbing than the actual brutal murders, is the reality of how poorly these crimes were handled. The horrible truth is that no one believed that these murders could have been done by a predatory stranger, so many innocent people were accused of these murders. And jailed, and executed, and lynched.

Reading this book was kind of like watching a car accident----horrifying, but no one is able to look away.

Bottom line--- I believe that they solved the murders!

Perhaps I'm not the best one to review this book. While I normally love true crime stories, the number of children that were killed really bothered me. In addition, the writing was so tedious I couldn't get more than one-third through the book. The author attempted to inject some humor, but it just wasn't working. It appears to be well-researched and the story itself is fascinating, but I couldn't garner any interest in the book. One item that was very frustrating is the author would bring things up, then say, never mind, we'll talk about it later, but remember this. Another item was telling the story, and after pages and pages of description, dialog, etc., he would say, oh, i left out this part of the story, then he'd off in another direction (specifically, chloroform issue). Very hard to follow.

I received a free electronic copy of this crime history from Netgalley, Bill James, and Scribner. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

I like the style of Bill James. If he is not sure of something, he will tell you so and then present his opinion for you to take, or leave. And this is an excellent look at the turn of the twentieth century crime spree from 1898 through 1912 and a bit beyond. Surprisingly an axe was the weapon of choice for killing your family members during part of this timeline. Who would have thought? But even if that fact were dominate, no one else could tell this tale with the panache of Bill James. I hope he will continue to branch out into non-ball game oriented stories.