The pedantic complaint about this book, a history of axe murder, is that it is not about murder. It includes both lawful and unlawful killings.

It is also not about axes, or it requires a sort of acknowledgment of the concept of the axe in conceptual rather than material form.

That is also what makes the subject interesting, in the sense that the axe exists as an ancient, prosaic tool that also has utility for death. But on the third hand, that is what makes the mixture of the types of killing awkward. It is not, strictly speaking, about the misuse of the tool, but also (considering war and executions) use of the tool as designed. It is like if a history of the fork included the history of the trident. In contrast to its subject, the read is short and breezy. Too much so sometimes, with abbreviated takes that walk right up to misleading, and odd springs where the author decides to police her own tone.

The emphasis here is on murder. Having been ...axe...pilled? by a previous book, I expected more of the material history. This is true crime primarily, a story that moves through time, starting in prehistory with what we think might be death via axe of hominins, and ending in the contemporary world. 

The stories are good. The storytelling is good. At worst, it tries too hard, landing more sentimental than sensationalist. But the author blends cultural study into the facts of the cases to look at the way that the deaths were perceived, specifically since 'axe murderer' is a trope, and that trope itself has a history. This is why I think that the later chapters are stronger than the earlier ones: the author is having a more enjoyable time with more extrinsic material to work with. Likewise, the tone of the book is nonchalant in a way that plain meshes better with more densely framed material, which the author has in the present and does not have in the past. 

My thanks to the author, Rachel McCarthy James, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, for making the ARC available to me.