Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate / Ginger Strand 252 p.

Interstate highways wreck the environment, fragment communities, cause accidents, and as author Strand points out in this scholarly work of true-crime, serve as a nexus for all sorts of unsavory activity.  Yet there's something about them I love - go figure.  So I was intrigued by this book, and found it mostly worthwhile.  Strand presents a squishy thesis, namely that highways are an expression of the American need for independence and mobility, and that highway violence is a reflection of our uneasiness with those same traits.  At least I think that's the idea.
There's lots of history of the development of the highway system (a.k.a. the automobile industrial complex), paired with chapters detailing the exploits of some pretty prolific serial killers whose access to victims was enhanced in some way by the interstate.  Most interesting was a long chapter on a horrible series of child murders in inner-city Atlanta in the early 80s, which many sociologists believe was made possible by the hacking up of urban neighborhoods in the 60s by highways and their on-ramps, leaving once tightly-knit neighbors alienated from one another.  She closes with a chapter on a contemporary criminal hotspot, the truck stop, and the high rate of murders associated with them, most notably of prostitutes.   I wish Strand had presented more solutions here, but there was lots of enlightening reading.