“The most dangerous thing in the world,” Ted Bundy, the infamous American serial killer, is often quoted as saying, “is a man who doesn’t seem dangerous at all.” Truman Capote understood something of this paradox when he opened In Cold Blood with a landscape instead of the murderer: “the village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.” The most haunting crime narratives begin with the world that produced fear around them. Rakesh Goswami’s India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer: Shankariya Kanpatimar attempts something similar—reconstructing not merely the crimes of a murderer, but the atmosphere of dread that gripped Rajasthan in the 1970s. The book revisits the case of Shankariya Kanpatimar, a criminal from Sri Ganganagar who allegedly claimed nearly 70 lives within a span of eighteen months.…