We Die in the Dark (The Hunt for Serial Killers in the Secret City Beneath Las Vegas)

In this riveting true crime thriller, New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari shines a light on a community living beneath the Las Vegas strip—a subterranean world where a serial killer preyed on the most vulnerable.

Hari thought he was going to Las Vegas to report a single story, but a series of introductions led him to Tommy and Shay, a couple from Hawaii living in the tunnels of Vegas beneath Caesar’s Palace. They ushered him into a secret world below the city, a world in which community and survival were interlinked, and where the shadow of the Vegas strip’s immense wealth provided cover for random and unspeakable acts of violence. That world grew more terrifying when people started getting murdered, bludgeoned as they slept on the streets and in the tunnels.

Hari began returning to Vegas again and again, and soon began to suspect that a serial killer might be operating in Las Vegas praying on the unhoused. The mystery of the culprit’s identity and motives would take Hari deep into the city’s history, and into a chain of tragic events that involved a horrific border crossing and a cult like Korean church whose theology cast out the homeless as non-human. Faced with a potential killer whose depravity could not be reduced to pure evil and haunted by the disappearance of Tommy and Shay during the chaos of the pandemic, Hari’s quest for the truth took him to the heart of a city and a country where the ever-widening cracks are easier to fall into, and where the broken find increasingly easy targets for rage and retribution.

Johann Hari’s riveting true crime thriller We Die in the Dark is at once a disturbing journey into the mystery of a serial killer stalking the homeless of Las Vegas, and a powerful examination of the social forces rolling America that make such killings inevitable. Blending brilliant narrative storytelling, deep research, and gripping firsthand accounts, Hari immerses readers in a subterranean world beneath some of the richest locales in America, where danger lurks for society’s most vulnerable.