God’s Not Here, Only Devils: Revelations from the Toolbox Killers

Five years of interviews with a convicted serial murderer form the backbone of criminologist Brand’s chilling debut. As part of a study on serial killers, Brand reached out to Lawrence Bittaker in 2014, when he was on death row at San Quentin prison. The pair discussed Bittaker’s 1979 abduction, rape, and murder of five teenage girls across Southern California with his accomplice Roy Norris—a killing spree that earned them the nickname “the toolbox killers,” because they tortured their victims with household tools. Brand explains how Bittaker and Norris met in prison in the late ’70s and, after their release, transformed a van into a mobile torture chamber. She details the pair’s crimes, but her account of the rapport she and Bittaker cultivated is just as unsettling: he named her his next of kin and, after refusing to cooperate with police for decades, gave her a map to the graves of his last two victims before dying of natural causes in 2019. Brand interweaves her and Bittaker’s conversations with compassionate portraits of his victims and snapshots of her own grief over her cousin’s murder of her best friend in 2015. Along the way, she steadily probes the inner workings of remorseless killers without losing sight of the human cost of their crimes. For true crime devotees, this is a must. (June)