The Devil's Rooming House

The Devil's Rooming House
By M. William Phelps
Lyons Press, 2010. 303 pgs. Biography

Amy Archer-Gilligan is the deadliest female serial killer in U.S history; running a home for the elderly in Connecticut, a lack of money led her to poison patients--and both her first and second husbands--with arsenic in order to hasten their deaths to give her access to more patients and more money. Amy, staunchly claimed to be a good Christian woman, being forced into ruin by townspeople in general and the local 's newspaper reporters in particular as they set out to prove that Amy's patients were not dying of natural causes.

Overall, this was an interesting book, as Phelps explored Amy's money problems, the lengthy investigation on the part of the local newspaper before the formal investigation by law enforcement began, and Amy's trial. However, the book could have been a few dozen pages shorter if the author didn't spend much of the first part of the book talking about the deadly heat wave of 1911; that tangential information really slowed down the beginning of the book.

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