Katherine Addison's Reviews > Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

I got this book because Telfer wasn't satisfied with retreading the same Caucasian Anglophone ground over again. She avoided the standard line-up, including American serial killers I'd never heard of, and branched out and found female serial killers in Morocco and Russia and Hungary (and not just the Countess Bathory, either, although she's in here) and Egypt. (She has a note at the end that says she was thwarted in her attempts to include "Clementine Barnabet, a young black girl from New Orleans, and Miyuki Ishikawa, a Japanese midwife" because she simply couldn't find enough information (271-2).

Telfer includes chapters on:
Erzsebet Bathory
Nannie Doss
Lizzie Halliday
Elizabeth Ridgeway
Raya & Sakina
Mary Ann Cotton
Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova
Anna Marie Hahn
Oum-El-Hassen
Tillie Klimek
Alice Kyteler
Kate Bender
The Angel-Makers of Nagyrev
Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers

In fact, of the women in this book, I knew about Erzsebet Bathory, Mary Ann Cotton, Kate Bender, and the Marquise de Brinvilliers, so it definitely broadened my horizons.

(I'm not sure how reliable Telfer's research is; she and Wikipedia disagree about what evidence the Marquise de Brinvilliers was convicted: Telfer says it was the testimony of a person the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to know existed, and while I don't trust Wikipedia, I'm also dubious about something that it completely doesn't know about. Also, a quick Google of this witness, Jean-Baptiste Briancourt, brings him up--so he did historically exist--but one of the two books in Google Books' repertoire is the one Telfer cites and the other says that Briancourt's evidence was short and not new and damning testimony. So proceed with caution.)

This is an easy read; Telfer's style is light, colloquial, and morbidly humorous, and she does a good job of presenting her subjects as three-dimensionally as she can. She is interested in the question of evil and humanity, although she never really goes much farther than ankle-deep.