Happy Like Murderers

By Gordon Burn

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

Happy Like Murderers (1998) is writer Gordon Burn's nonfiction account of Fred and Rosemary West, the couple who murdered young women, including members of their own family, in Gloucester, England. Drawing on police records, trial testimony and interviews, Burn reconstructs the Wests' backgrounds, their marriage and the life of their household at 25 Cromwell Street, where many of the bodies were found in 1994. He writes in a close, novelistic style that stays near the voices of the people involved.

Recommended by 1 person

• Edgar Wright: “I just finished reading Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers, which I first bought 22 years ago and never got around to reading (or was too scared).”