We Die in the Dark

In this riveting true crime thriller, New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari hunts the serial killers stalking Las Vegas—and finds a larger story about the disintegration of the American Dream.

This is the strangest serial killer story ever told: Hidden in the tunnels beneath the Las Vegas Strip is a secret city—one that homeless people have built, and the police are afraid to enter. When Johann Hari began to explore it in 2011, he discovered something strange: The tunnel-dwellers kept disappearing, or turning up dead.

Both Hari and the Vegas police begin to suspect that a serial killer might be preying on the homeless population in and around the tunnels. But even when a suspect was jailed, the murders did not stop. It soon became clear that something even darker was taking place—that Las Vegas had become an incubator for serial and spree killers who target the homeless, and nobody knew why.

This mystery would become a fifteen-year obsession for Hari. His quest for the truth led him to investigate a chain of bizarre and tragic events, including the kidnapping of a thirteen-year-old girl, the election of a mayor who befriended one of the worst murderers in American history, and the rise of a cult-like Korean church predicting the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust. Hari gained unique access to the police investigation, the prosecutors, the defense, the families—and, in a shocking final confrontation, he came face to face with the killers themselves.

We Die in the Dark is an astonishing page-turner—one that reveals the dark trendlines in the United States that are increasingly spilling over into murder, and shows that serial killers are not what we think they are.