Meticulously researched and well documented Bill James does what he does best - analyzes & comes to a solid & convincing conclustion.

I did not finish this advance reading copy, but appreciate receiving it. I really thought I would enjoy this book because it sounded like it would combine my love of history with my CSI/serial killers interests. Unfortunately, I could not manage the author's writing style. What started out seeming kind of "regular Joe" or "folksy" quickly began to grate on me. As the book progressed and this became more and more annoying, I started questioning the seriousness of the author's research and conclusions that were being drawn. I had to quit reading at that point.

This book blew me away. It took me three days to get through, just so that I could process all of the information that the author was throwing at me. I would read a third of the book and then have to put it down so that I could process all of the information. It was so good, that I was constantly thinking about the evidence, the authors writing style, and the poor victims.
The Man from the Train is the true story of a string of horrific murders that occurred from 1900 to 1912. The author lays bare the evidence (or lack there of) and why he thinks he can contribute it to ONE man who took a train to get to the victims locations.
By the end of the book, I was convinced that the murders were committed by one man. The very end of the book (by this time, I could NOT put the book down) the author reveals the name of the person who he believes committed these murders.
In the end, the author laid out the evidence, the victims (entire families living near train lines), and who he thinks is/was the killer.
I loved it and for fans of true crime and history, this is a great book!

History Speaks: A Serial Killer Identified With Exhaustive Research and Careful Analytics

"He was a tiny man who cast a huge and terrible shadow, and he knew that, and in his mind he was the size of his shadow."

Between 1898 and 1912, an unbelievably large number of families were bludgeoned to death in their homes, while they slept, across the United States. I know it was an unusually large number because baseball analyst Bill James, with the aid of his daughter Rachel McCarthy James researching, uncovered unprecedented links and patterns between the crimes, often using statistical analysis. They believe that in the course of their exhaustive research and writing, they discovered the serial killer responsible for the home invasions and murders.

The Villisca axe murders of Villisca, Iowa in 1912 is the most well-known of this crime wave - the house where the murders occurred is a visitable if macabre tourist attraction. The killer operated at the same time and sometimes near the New Orleans axe murderer but the book proves definitively that they were not one and the same. Like unfortunate trends of gun violence or school shootings, axe murdering was apparently the popular preferred method of being an unhinged violent murderer in that day and age. I learned a lot from this book!
James is an influential and innovative figure in his field of baseball history and statistics, and has written many books on the sport. It's interesting that he's turned to such a completely different topic, but it works in his favor as he applies his analytical way of thinking to the collected facts of these events. The authors have been able to convincingly link up more than it seems anyone previously was able to do.

It's that statistical, analytical understanding, coupled with thorough research of primary sources including oceans of small-town newspapers, that allowed them to identify a long, carefully curated list of traits that the connected crimes share, with a few especially telling standouts that seem to persuasively indicate the work of the same person. They pored over thousands of newspaper articles from the years involving and surrounding the crimes and were able to collect many clues and coincidences, or what seems to have been accepted as coincidence at the time. With the hindsight of history and plenty of data crunching, it would be difficult to believe another narrative than what they've pieced together.

"The crimes that we have described...represent a very significant portion of all the family murders that occurred in the United States in those years. Another thing that unites these murders is simply that they are so horrible. Almost every crime in this book was described in the newspapers as 'the most horrible crime ever committed in this region' or 'one of the most terrible crimes ever in this state' or by some similar phrase...There simply are not many crimes like this."

A few characteristics stand out especially, either due to uniqueness of the action or prevalence at the scenes, and they help tie together some of the crimes and prove the authors' thesis that one man was responsible. These traits include his preference for selecting victims very near to train tracks, striking with the blunt side of the axe and within hours of midnight, covering victims' faces and items in the houses like windows and mirrors with cloth, he never stole, often moved the bodies and lingered in the homes after killing, and to top off  the horrifying scene, he showed sexual interest in prepubescent girls.

The writing tone is unusual, at least for the type of true crime I usually read. It's not the sort of cheap or sensationalist style I mostly avoid, it absolutely has great literary qualities, but there are often chatty asides to the reader ("I apologize for the need to write this" etc.) or passages that were bizarrely opinionated and strayed from the main story. The latter are fewer, but I personally hate when an author chats to you or makes odd jokes throughout a book. It's mostly forgivable here though, because once the whole book is finished, I appreciated the overall effect and what the authors have researched and shown, even if I didn't love certain styles or chapters.

They make a convincing case, thanks in no small part to their well-researched awareness of what the country and its culture, law enforcement and legal areas, and transportation systems were like at the closing of the century.

"The first thing that needed to be done was: open your eyes and see what is happening. Don't make up reasons why this can't be happening: it is happening."

In addition to the relative disconnect between police, sheriffs, and the spread of news and facts across state lines (and the killer's seeming understanding of this, as he would quickly jump a train in the middle of the night after killing and not strike again for several hundred miles in a recognizable and clear geographic pattern) James drives the above point home. Members of law enforcement and even press were wary of accepting the theory that a single psychopathic serial killer was at work.

It's the same denial logic that allowed infamous Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo to do as much as he did, and at least part of the problem with apprehending certain modern killers whose abundant streaks in various locations don't get connected, like Ted Bundy, or too wildly unbelievable to be accepted as being perpetrated by a single person, like the Long Island Serial Killer.

But James stresses this lesson from history, and the stats and analysis presented are sure hard to argue with.

Despite some dry sections or rambling details and some confusion in the plethora of names and families and potential suspects and the like, it's a suspenseful, fascinating account and an example of time shedding light on some of the shadows of history.