Book Review: Skull In The Ashes by Peter Kaufman

Some true crime books feel clean and organized. Nice little timelines. Neatly explained motives. Detectives heroically solving crimes before dinner.

Skull in the Ashes isn’t that book.

It feels like somebody dumped a shovel full of burned secrets onto the table and said, “Good luck figuring this mess out.”

It starts in 1897 when a general store burns down in Walford, Iowa. The next morning they find a charred body in the ashes, and everybody just sort of nods and says, “Well, guess Frank Novak died in the fire.”

Except… did he?

That question hangs over the entire book like smoke.

Pretty quickly things start smelling worse than the burned building. Novak had life insurance policies. Convenient. 

The body might actually belong to a hard-drinking laborer named Edward Murray. Also convenient. 

Book Review: True Crime in Lee County, Iowa

 

Lee County looks like the place where nothing much happens. River towns. Brick streets. People who wave when they pass you. Then True Crime in Lee County, Iowa by Robert Turek steps in and says, “Look closer.”

 

This book doesn’t shout. It leans in.

 

You get brothers turning on each other. Bank jobs that shake whole towns. Murders that don’t sit right, even years later. The cases that never really end—they just go quiet for a while.

 

What works here is the feeling. These aren’t distant stories. They’re close. Familiar. You can picture the streets. The houses. The neighbors who suddenly have something to hide.

 

There’s a steady shadow running through it all—the Iowa State Penitentiary. Old, heavy, unavoidable. You can feel its presence in the background, like it’s part of every story, whether or not it’s mentioned.

 

The writing keeps things moving. Clean. Direct. No wasted space. It gives you just enough detail to pull you in, then lets your mind do the rest. Some stories hit fast. Others linger, especially the ones without answers.

 

That’s the hook. Not everything gets wrapped up. Some of these cases stay open. Stay uneasy.

 

By the end, you start looking at small towns a little differently.

 

Quiet doesn’t mean safe.

Iowa Crime Time Is Available Now

 

Iowa looks harmless.

Wide skies. Gravel roads. Farmhouses spaced just far enough apart that nothing ever seems to happen. The place where people leave doors unlocked and believe evil belongs somewhere else.

It didn’t.

Between 1874 and 1935, violence slipped quietly into Iowa’s towns and countryside. It didn’t arrive with warning signs or sirens. It came in the night. It came through back doors and empty streets. It hid behind borrowed names, stolen cars, and familiar faces.

Iowa Crime Time exposes forgotten crimes that shattered the illusion of safety. Bank robberies carried out with military precision. Outlaws who passed through the state like ghosts—here one day, gone the next. Men and women whose names would become legends, leaving fear and blood behind them as they moved on.

Some crimes were fast and brutal. Others were slow, calculated, and deeply unsettling. In one quiet town, a single night of violence left a scar so deep it never healed. After that, no door felt strong enough. No night felt truly quiet again.

These stories don’t unfold in crowded cities or lawless frontiers. They happen in places that believed they were immune. That belief made the danger worse.

This book isn’t about puzzles or courtroom drama. It’s about atmosphere—about the growing sense that something is wrong long before anyone realizes how bad it’s going to be. It’s about the fear of knowing that help is miles away, that darkness can move freely, and that evil doesn’t need chaos to thrive.

Iowa Crime Time drags these stories back into the light and reminds us of a chilling truth: The most dangerous places aren’t always obvious. Sometimes, they’hide in the corn.

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History

The Lincoln Highway sounds innocent enough. A nice old road. Something you learn about from a brochure while standing next to a bronze plaque. Darcy Dougherty Maulsby’s The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History takes that tidy idea, shakes it hard, and shows you the mess underneath.

The Lincoln Highway wasn’t some graceful ribbon of progress floating across Iowa. It was a fight. Towns clawed at each other to get on the route, knowing that a line on a map could mean survival—or a long slide into irrelevance. Meetings were held. Deals were cut. Routes shifted. Winners celebrated. Losers stewed.

 

Maulsby is especially good at showing how rough the early days really were. Before smooth concrete and reliable maps, Iowa roads were muddy traps waiting to swallow cars whole. Early motorists were gamblers. You might make it to the next town. You might not. That sense of risk hums quietly beneath the book.

 

The book really comes alive along the roadside. Gas stations, cafes, tourist cabins, motor courts—each one a small act of faith. People built their livelihoods on the hope that cars would keep coming. Some struck gold. Others watched traffic dry up when the route shifted a few miles south or a bypass cut them out entirely. Maulsby has a sharp eye for these human stories, and lets them unfold without sentimentality.

Book Review: Whatever It Took by Henry Langrehr

Henry Langrehr came from Clinton, Iowa. A river town. Factories, cold winters, work that didn’t ask how you felt. That kind of place teaches you to endure before it teaches you to dream. 

On June 6, 1944, he jumped into France with the 82nd Airborne. The sky over Normandy was shredded with anti-aircraft fire. Men were hit in the air. Some never reached the ground. Langrehr crashed through the glass roof of a greenhouse in Sainte-Mère-Église and kept moving because stopping meant dying.

 

The drop was chaos. Units were scattered. Orders didn’t exist. The survivors fought German tanks with rifles and nerve. Most of the men he trained with were gone within days. On June 29, he was captured.

 

From there, the war showed its real face.

 

Langrehr was held near a death camp and saw what the Nazis called efficiency. People marched to their deaths. Bodies stacked like lumber. It wasn’t rumor or ideology. It was machinery. He watched because he had no choice.

Book Review: Murder & Mayhem in Scott County

You pick up Murder & Mayhem in Scott County, Iowa expecting a tidy little history lesson—maybe some musty courthouse trivia, a harmless stroll through the polite past. Instead, the thing hits you like a warm Schlitz can lobbed from a moving pickup. Scott County isn’t the wholesome Midwest postcard you were promised. It’s a long, low scream under the polite small-talk.

Grace Reed on Utica Ridge Road? That story crawls under your skin and refuses to pay rent. Margaretha Nehlsen poisoning her own kids with chocolate—chocolate, of all things—makes you want to interrogate every candy dish you’ve ever seen at a church potluck. And Harry Hamilton, the ex-cop who decided law enforcement was more exciting when you were shooting at it—he’s the kind of character you expect to find at 2 a.m. in a tavern that claims it closes at midnight.

The book doesn’t guide you so much as shove you down a gravel road at high speed, shouting facts at you through the open window. There’s a feverish energy to it, the sense that the author has been living on gas-station coffee and county-archive dust for far too long. Each chapter feels like it was pulled from a file drawer that local officials swore didn’t exist.

Eerie Iowa Booke Review

 

Iowa looks calm. Cornfields. Church bells. Pie contests. Then Eerie Iowa comes along and says, “Sure, but have you met the monsters?”

Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters take you down the gravel roads of the Hawkeye State and into the dark. They find a winged thing glowing over Van Meter in 1903. A lake monster curling under Okoboji. Bigfoot, naturally, tromping around Calhoun County like he owns the place.

 

It’s not just stories—they dig up history, too. Facts. Names. Newspaper clippings. All the little details that make you wonder if maybe it really did happen.

 

There’s a Kafka inspired sculpture that looks like it might start whispering to you if you stare too long. And Black Angels straight out of Hell that portend death if you look at them wrong.

 

The writing? Sharp. Weird. A little wicked. The kind that makes you smile right before the hair on your neck stands up. And the pictures. Bruce Walter’s drawings are haunting. Somewhat scary.