The contents of this book are not pleasant, by any means, and have to be taken in small pieces. However, the writing strikes a good balance of giving enough detail to tell you what happened and make your stomach turn without going overboard and making you want to scrub your brain with bleach. It takes an adequately distanced approach--and talks about the good men balanced out these criminals, including having entire features that focused on good people who died due to foul play--enough to make it tolerable to read. So as far as the quality of the book is concerned, it was very good. And it did serve to give a glimpse into the variety of motivations people may have for doing evil things, which will help with writing my own villains and was my primary purpose in reading this book.

Would I recommend it to others? Not really. But it does provide a well-communicated glimpse into the darker side of history that we tend to gloss over and sugar-coat. ( )