Our Take

Puhak has a gift for finding the feminist undercurrent in historical narratives that have calcified into myth, and The Blood Countess is her sharpest work yet. The Bathory legend is one of history's most lurid—blood baths, hundreds of victims, a noblewoman of almost cartoonish evil—and Puhak's achievement is making you feel the full weight of how convenient that legend was for everyone who wanted Bathory gone.

The book works on two levels simultaneously: as a propulsive true crime investigation and as a meditation on how power, gender, and wealth intersect to make certain women into monsters in the historical record. Puhak never loses the thread of either. The archival research is serious; the pacing never flags.

Readers who loved The Dark Queens by Puhak herself or Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe will find a lot to admire here. And anyone drawn to the intersection of women's history and true crime will find The Blood Countess essential reading—unsettling, rigorous, and impossible to dismiss.