Bloodletters and Badmen is a fine coffee table book about the history of crime in America. Open to pretty much any page and you'll find an intriguing article; and with over six hundred pages there's certainly a lot to get through. The book covers pretty much every type of crook you could imagine, from serial killers and spree murderers, to Depression-era outlaws and Mob bosses, Old West gunslingers and sex offenders, kidnappers and cannibals, swindlers and bank robbers, crimes of passion and assassins. Most of the most notorious crooks are here, along with many obscure ones you're likely to have never heard of. Nash is a fine writer with an electrifying style; his writing style is terse, crisp and wonderfully descriptive. It's passionate, which inevitably leads to bias on occasions, but mostly it makes for gripping reading.