Peter Vronsky is an expert on serial killers, with two previous books on the subject and a Ph.D. in criminal justice history. He also has a tendency to bump into them in the wild--Richard Cottingham in 1979, Gary "Mick" MacFarlane in the 1980s and Andrei Chikatilo in 1990. In Sons of Cain, Vronsky traces the arc of psychopathic violence over millennia to put into perspective this terrible strain of murderers.
He begins with the patterns of rape and killing among Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and suggests there remains an innate human drive toward carnage that must be socially curtailed. Why don't more people become serial killers, he asks. Moving forward through history, he covers werewolf myths and medieval witch trials in all their gory detail. With such a broad scope, it is easy to get lost down rabbit holes--like the one about medical conditions related to werewolf physiognomy.
Nevertheless, with dry humor and nauseating case studies, Sons of Cain hits its stride as Vronsky closes in on what is considered the "golden age" of serial killers in the U.S., 1950-2000. Factoring in a trend of perpetrators who first kill at around age 30, he points a convincing finger at World War II, and the atrocities that American GIs both witnessed and instigated therein, as the progenitor of bad seeds. "My hypothesis is that a broken generation of men either raised or abandoned a dysfunctional generation of boys... the sons of Cain."
There is clearly more research to be done; the term serial killer wasn't even coined until the early '80s. What Sons of Cain clarifies, though, is the relatively new understanding of an age-old phenomenon. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness