A New York Times–bestselling journalist traces a string of unsolved murders—and the botched investigation that let the New Bedford Highway Killer leave.

During the period of seven weeks in 1988, eleven females disappeared from the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was after the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two had been never found. As well as the perpetrator remains unknown to this day.

How could any such thing happen? How, in what was once about Killing Time of year: The Unsolved Case of New England’s Deadliest Serial Killer among America’s richest metropolitan areas, could the regulators allow their most susceptible people down this terribly? As Carlton Smith, a Pulitzer Reward finalist for his insurance of the Green River Killer case, demonstrates in this riveting account, it was the shortcoming of cops and politicians as well to set aside their personal agendas that let a psychopath from the hook.

In Killing Time of year, Smith takes readers right into a close-knit community of working-class women and men, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, as well as the halls of New Britain law enforcement to tell the storyplot of the epic failure of justice.