It’s 1970 and Caroline Fraser is 9 years old, living outside of Tacoma, Wash. That local refineries are dumping 8.5 million gallons of smelter discharge a day, including 2,500 pounds of toxic metals, ...

“Murderland,” a new book, links serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to a Tacoma smelter. The book explores the connection between lead exposure and violent crime. It focuses largely on the city’s ...

Two new books, different in subject but oddly companionable in spirit, look past the surfaces of American storytelling and toward the forces that shape it -- some intimate, some atmospheric, some ...