The Devil’s Rooming House is the gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree—a book M. William Phelps has been working on for nearly six years.

A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in 1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit and Hollywood film Arsenic and Old Lace.

The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer.

In telling this fascinating story, Crime Rant partner M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.

Thursday, April 29: 7:00 PM
Guilford Free Library
Guilford, CT
Lecture/Signing

Thursday, May 5, 7:00 PM
Borders Books
Fairfield, CT
Lecture/Signing

Connecticut Magazine
May issue
Brief Q&A

M. William Phelps (Matt to CR readers!) has a new book out this month…and it’s another winner. Here’s a snip from the jacket:

A loving father and his new wife set out to pick up his kids for a scheduled weekend visit – but never suspected they were walking into a death trap. A handwritten note instructed Alan and Terra Bates to enter the back door of his exwife’s Alabama home. A day later their charred bodies were found hundreds of miles away, wrapped in blankets, in a burned-out car’s trunk on a desolate Georgia road.

At Jessica McCord’s house, law enforcement found windows covered in blankets, a cache of weapons and ammunition, carpets torn up, new tile on the floors – a couch gone. Then they learned about the nasty divorce and bitter custody battle that had landed Jessica in jail. Upon release, Jessica swore, ‘Somebody is going to pay’. With her new police-officer husband, Jessica became the prime suspect in this brutal double murder.

Check it out! Available now!

And yes, people are talking.

Gregg Olsen’s latest thriller Victim Six is out this week and into the hands of readers across the country and Canada (the book’s number 18 on the News West bestselling paperback list). There have been some great newspaper and blog stories about the book and its author.

Charlie Bermant of the Port Orchard Independent wrote a story with a headline Olsen loved so much he had a T-shirt made with it emblazoned under the title of the book. For those who don’t know Debbie Macomber is probably in the top five of bestselling authors in the world. She makes her home in Port Orchard, which she has dubbed “Cedar Cove” in a series of bestselling romances.

Says Bermant in his piece:

While Debbie Macomber’s romanticized Cedar Cove setting has earned her millions of worldwide fans, another local author’s fictional portrayal of Port Orchard is quite different.

Yup, he’s got that right.

David Chesnow over on AmeriCollector (serial killers collect bodies, don’t they?) had this to say about Victim Six.

“The Exorcist” scared the bejesus out of me as well, but forget the demonic possession – forget, even, the fashionable Northwest vampires: “Victim Six” (Pinnacle), a novel about serial murder by Gregg Olsen, is one book that will remind you just how much fun a great read really is. A New York Times best-selling true-crime writer based in Olalla, Wash., Olsen knows enough about the evil that men (and women, too, dearies) do in real life not to have to resort to the supernatural to know exactly how to creep you out. After all, he IS originally from Seattle …”

Jennifer Morris (way smarter and more talented than Olsen’s fictional Serenity Hutchins!) of the What’s Up section of the Kitsap newspaper group wrote a terrific feature on Olsen. She calls it like she sees it.

The book is shocking, darker than Olsen’s four previous works of fiction. He is best known for “Starvation Heights,” a true-crime account of Olalla’s Linda Burfield Hazzard, a doctor who starved her patients to death. Olsen has written on a battery of other real world cases, covering such topics of fascination as convicted child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau and Tanya Reid, a mother who murdered one of her children and attempted to kill the other.

And finally, a review from Web Digest Weekly that gives Olsen’s book an A+.

Author Gregg Olsen, who has penned such popular true crime titles as Bitter Almonds, and novels like Hear tof Ice, returns to the forefront of his genre with Victim Six. Easily one of the best entries in his catalog, this is one that will keep readers voraciously consuming it until the last word, and then talking about it for ages thereafter. Olsen is truly a master at his craft. One of the finest releases of the new year, Victim Six is highly, excitedly recommended reading.

New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen will appear at the following locations in support of his latest thriller, Victim Six.

January 30, 3 p.m., Barnes & Noble, Silverdale, WA.
February 2, Bethel Avenue Books, Port Orchard, WA.
February 6, noon, Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Seattle, WA.
February 6, 3:30 p.m., Borders, Gig Harbor, WA.
February 11, 10 a.m., Mystery Book Club Read, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo WA.
February 11, Powell’s, “drive by” signing, Beaverton, OR.
February 11, 7 p.m., Murder by the Book, Portland, OR.
February 12, location TBD, Eugene OR.
February 13, noon, North by Northwest, Lincoln City, OR.