These stories about serial murders go where no crime podcast could

Book Review Highway Thirteen: Stories By Fiona McFarlane Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 255 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. In “Highway Thirteen” Fiona McFarlane, a professor at UC Berkeley, follows the trajectory of an Australian serial killer back and forth through time, from before the killer’s birth to years in the future. In the first story, “Tourists,” it’s 2008, almost 20 years after the killings, and a compulsively polite young man is importuned by the office oddball to visit the scene of the crimes, now the main stop on an international circuit of tourists obsessed by the crimes. Lena, who has read everything and knows every detail of the murders, is unapologetically engrossed in the killings: “Her eyes were always slightly moist, as if she were poised to be moved by the world at any moment.” Joe girds himself and follows her into the woods, where a distant, dark voice invades his head and threatens his carefully constructed sense of self. In “Demolition,” Eva, an old woman, returns to a forbidden love lodged far deeper in her memory than her encounters with the killer: “ham on the Lainey table, hands swatting at flies all through the saying of grace — the laziness of lunchtime flies, the slowness of hands during grace, and Josie’s foot pressing Eva’s under the table; the organ in the front room with its odd, resisting pedals … Josie, Josie, Josie.” The murderer’s home next door is demolished; Eva’s longing will never go away.