Book excerpt: Profiles of history’s most “elite” serial killers—including Bluebeard, Henry Lee Lucas, and Erzsébet Báthory. “This isn’t a book for the faint of heart.” —Publishers Weekly Historical in scope and international in breadth, this collection of true-crime stories chronicles fifteen of the most infamous “extreme killers” who ever lived—those with the largest number of confirmed kills, in many cases more than fifty. The subjects range from fifteenth-century French child killer Gilles de Rais, purportedly the model for the folk legend of “Bluebeard,” to Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole, who inspired the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer; to Samuel Little, America’s most prolific serial killer with sixty confirmed and 93 claimed murdered, to Mikhail Popkov, dubbed “The Werewolf” by Russian media for having slain more than 70 women between 1992 and 2010.