Women killers are unsettling in a way that male serial killers are not; they disturb both our construct of what feminine, maternal beings should "be," and they disrupt our understanding of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity theories by creating an "other" that threatens instead of nurtures. Portrayals of female serial killers are often cushioned by excusable background details: someone or something caused an otherwise normal, gentle woman to become monstrous. Kelleher's typology details seven different types of female killers, each one motivated by something that pushed them to do what they do, while none are simply bad people who kill. The scholarly introduction to this novella explores why we carry such an aversion to viewing female murderers as simply that, along with a variety of examples in modern American fiction and film to serve as examples of the prevalence of this behavior.

The second part of this dissertation, Fortunemaker, is a novella about the real-life murders committed by Indiana resident Belle Gunness over the span of two decades, with an eventual police case opened in 1908 following a related farmhouse fire. The case begins with the bodies of three children and a headless adult woman recovered from the charred remains of the fire. Investigators quickly rule it an unfortunate occurrence, but one neighbor strikes doubt across the event by pointing out how small the headless woman's corpse is, and how Belle Gunness was a large woman. The case is riddled with manipulation, calculated murders, inconsistencies in forensic findings, and a shockingly high number of victims lacking any modus operandi. The genre is historical fiction due to the many missing pieces of Gunness' biography and the goal to create a gripping, close-up story surrounding her character, her community, her victims, and the investigation of her crimes.