Fraser, who hails from Mercer Island, investigates the link between repeat violent offenders and their exposure to lead, arsenic and other dirty materials in her true-crime nonfiction focused on Tacoma’s infamous Asarco industrial plant and the prevalence of serial killers from the Pacific Northwest.

In the late 1800s, the plant began processing mainly lead ores from local mines and switched in 1912 to copper, yielding inorganic arsenic, according to the book. The smelter, which bordered Ruston and north Tacoma, emitted lead and arsenic for several decades as the centerpiece of a company town before it was shut down in 1985 and later redeveloped as the residential and retail hub known as Point Ruston.

The plant’s long-menacing presence over Tacoma, “a place where paraphilias flourish like fungi,” is a central theme of “Murderland” and woven between stories of dangerous men who have lived within the plume’s path.

Bundy, who later confessed to killing more than two-dozen women but is suspected in the deaths of many others, was a teenager in 1961 living in the city’s Skyline neighborhood, near lead levels that were “astonishingly high,” according to the book.