Kate Winkler Dawson Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Kate Winkler Dawson is a non-fiction, history, and crime author best known for her debut novel “Death in the Air.” Dawson has more than twenty-five years’ experience in television, where she worked as a writer, line producer, and field producer for some of the largest news companies in the United States. She started as an associate producer and editor at “KVUE-24” in Austin, before she became a producer at “KEYE 42.” She went to Boston University to get her bachelor’s in broadcast journalism and during this time she worked for “WLVI” as a political field producer in Boston. Kate was critical in the coverage of the New Hampshire presidential primaries in 1996. The following year, she moved across the pond to work as a United Press International wire service reporter in London while she did her final semester at Boston University. Once she graduated from college, she got employment with “WCBS,” the flagship station for “CBS” in New York, where she worked as a field producer and writer. She spent five years as a freelance producer and then two more years freelancing as an off-air reporter/producer for “ABC Network News Radio.” Working as a freelance show producer, she was responsible for several top shows on “Fox News.” For two years, she was a staff field producer for the San Francisco Bureau of “Fox News” and traveled all across the US working on national news.

Winkler Dawson went to Columbia University for her masters in journalism and also taught at the journalism school at Fordham University for two years. During this time, she was also the patron and advisor for several student papers. In the year 2000, she got into documentary making when she produced “La Candelaria” her first film. Since then, she has produced several movies including the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival premier “The Long Haul,” Two Boots theater theatrical production “Grass Ceiling,” and the internationally screened film “Breaking the Barrier” and ABC Nightline’s “Goldrush.” Dawson taught at the broadcast journalism department of the University of Texas for nearly a decade after leaving Fordham University’s Marymount College. Teaching was something that came to her naturally having taught literature and journalism at Fordham. While she was working for “ABC News” she was the faculty advisor for the digital news bureau named “ABC News on Campus” that reported on student news at the University of Texas.

She had become interested in writing while she was working for United Press international even as she was a senior student at Boston University. Kate Dawson fell in love with London as she felt so comfortable with the city. She was searching for some great stories for a novel she wanted to write when she stumbled upon the intriguing report of “The Great Smog.” Digging around in the newspapers, she started seeing headlines such as “Third Body Found” and “Murder House” concerning the John Reginald Christie serial killings. Dawson began looking into the story and soon realized that the fog and Christie had many parallels as killers. They both killed by asphyxiation, even if the fog killed far more people than Christie. Kate found each story creepy, atmospheric, and fascinating, and even more so combined. In 2014, she published “The Digital Reporter” and “Death in the Air” her blockbuster was published in 2017. The book has been her biggest success to date and has been optioned for TV. “American Sherlock” her second book has also been optioned for TV by Netflix. Apart from her writing, Kate Dawson is the creator and host of the “Tenfold More Wicked,” a true crime historical podcast hosted by the “Exactly Right” network.

“Death in the Air” by Kate Winkler Dawson tells the story of a London dealing with the aftereffects of the Second World War when it is hit by another disaster. December of 1952 is one of the worst in London history as a killer smog blankets the city for five days. The days are turned into thick blackness as mass transit grinds to a halt, criminals took over the streets, and more than twelve thousand people died from the poisonous fog. But even as the fog took its toll, another killer took advantage of it to cover his crimes. All over London, poor women were disappearing and while their disappearance did not cause much alarm, they had one thing in common. Most of the women were unlucky enough to meet Reginald Christ an unassuming and quiet man that asked them to come with him to his flat in Notting Hill – they would never be seen again. There was a media frenzy when the Beast of Rillington Place was taken into custody. Could he have hidden the bodies in the back garden, under the floorboards, or maybe in the walls of his house? Could his actions have been caused by the dreariness of the fog? Could he have been involved in the double homicide that had been reported in the same building a little less than three years before in which another man had been sentenced to death? It is a readable compulsive thriller that combines one of the most unfathomable serial killers in recent history and an even deadlier air pollution disaster.

“American Sherlock” the second novel by Kate Dawson is a story set in 1933 Berkeley, California. In a world full of curiosities including Bunsen burners, microscopes, beakers, and hundreds of books an investigator nicknamed the “American Sherlock Holmes” sat. Responsible for cracking more than two thousand puzzling cases over more than four decades of detective work, Edward Oscar Heinrich was the first and greatest of America’s forensic investigators. He was blessed with a creepy knack for unearthing clues, construing answers, and establishing almost magical evidence. He started working at a time of turmoil when Prohibition was at its heigh. The times meant that systematic study of evidence was pretty much nonexistent and sensationalized reporting was all the rage. But with his commanding presence and brilliance at crime scenes and in court, his work is what led to the development of all manner of cutting edge forensic techniques and tools such as fingerprinting, blood spatter analysis, lie detector tests, and ballistics in courts. While his work had its shortcomings, it proved pivotal in shaping criminal investigations in America.