Zodiac: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer

Robert Graysmith's career as an editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle led to his access to and interest in the details of the Zodiac murders in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s and 70s. His extremely popular book Zodiac (1986) was reprinted 13 times and translated into French. This exhaustive study of the unsolved crimes received refreshed popularity in 1990, when the New York police blamed it for the copycat killings that were occurring at that time in New York, accusing it of being "a textbook." Other nonfiction works about criminal investigations by Graysmith include: The Murder of Bob Crane (1992), about the death of the star of Hogan's Heroes; and Unibomber: A Desire to Kill (1997).