Strand is a fine writer and she makes a convincing case for how the highway system provided an opportunity for violence, especially toward women by serial killers, which is commentary on the larger context of how connecting the country through a system of major highways also created gross disconnections in community.

This book seemed to want to draw a relationship between the advent of the Interstate and serial killers but it didn't quite click with me. There's not much here in the way of criminal forensics or character study. In fact, the murders in this detailed history of the highway system were more distracting than indicative of a pattern. Strand made some interesting observations about the link between race and income disparity and the placement of freeways in neighborhoods. Many of the serial killers were poor and so were many of their victims. Some of the killings described happened within concentrated areas, which kinda blows the theory of them being tied to the presence of Interstate highways. (Highways, perhaps, but the interstate aspect of them is irrelevant.) The first killer described in the book knew most of his victims, so there doesn't appear to be any relationship to highways there at all to either the motivation or opportunity for killing.

Strand observes that prostitutes in truck stops might be safer from being victimized if they were allowed to conduct their business more openly. Part of their vulnerability comes from them being relatively unknown to each other and the people operating the truck stops where they congregate. It's easier to get away with killing someone that no one will miss. The killing of truck stop prostitutes is probably the strongest case the book has for tying the Interstate to serial killers, but Strand does admit that homicide is the number one cause of death for all prostitutes -- and not necessarily by a serial killer. Conversely, Strand also mentions that people who hitchhike on the Interstate have not been documented to have a significantly greater risk of being murdered than the general population.

The premise of the book is intriguing to me and Strand's writing flows, which is pretty remarkable considering how much of it is devoted to the history of building the Interstate. Not exactly a juicy subject but one I might have enjoyed more if it hadn't been interrupted with these brief synopses of killings.

Very interesting book. Before reading it I would have never thought about how the interstate could have been connected to the Atlanta child murders but of course it makes perfect sense. I'll have to check out more by the author.

I read a review of this book (can't remember where) and thought it sounded intriguing. I'm not a big fan of the true-crime genre, but this really doesn't fall into that category. Starting more or less chronologically from the beginnings of the Interstate Highway system, Strand takes actual cases of highway-related violence, and uses them to illustrate how our increased mobility has nurtured an increase in sociopathic and psychopathic crimes.

These crimes aren't just limited to serial killings. She also explores how highway construction has destroyed communities in places like inner-city Atlanta and Juarez, Mexico and contributed to their poverty, racial segregation and income inequality. She doesn't mention my own city of Austin, but we have a prime example in IH35, which has long divided the city by race and class.

Strand writes thoughtfully on this topic without being too heavy-handed. I've always admired the Interstate Highway system and from childhood was fascinated with which roads linked up varoius cities. I'll never look at a map of that system in the same way again. And I'll have a very different outlook the next time I take a long road trip, that's for sure.

I might look into some of the other titles from the Discovering America series by the University of Texas Press. If they are all as well-written as this one, they should be worth it.

I really enjoyed the way this book took a central concept (highways) and spiraled out into how different killers interacted with it, what advantages and disadvantages modern travel gives them, etc. Though this is certainly a book that's scholarly enough to be taught, it also goes down easily. Would love to see more true crime collections using this type of lens to interrogate their suspects.

I thought this was well-researched and fairly well-written, although it's beyond obvious that many of the chapters should be their own books. Strand does a decent job of intermingling the stories of highway violence and serial killers with the growth of the interstate system without straying into overblown descriptions of said violence. Each chapter touches on a topic that wider-reaching than one could address in a single chapter, and it's too her credit that she is both focused enough to tell most of each story, while not losing sight of the larger cultural picture.