Lise Olsen - Investigative Reporter and Author

THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER - coming from Random House in 2025.Click here to preorder

Lise Olsen is a senior investigative reporter and editor whose work has appeared in the Texas Observer, Inside Climate News, and the Houston Chronicle, as well as in documentaries on Netflix, CNN, A&E, and Paramount.

Her book, THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys will be published by Random House April 1, 2025. Olsen's first book is CODE OF SILENCE.

For more information, email the author: liseolseninvestigates@gmail.com

Or Rachel Parker, Publicity, Random House: rparker@randomhouse.com.

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THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER is the gripping, upside-down detective story of a Texas forensic anthropologist named Sharon Derrick who, determined to close the cases of the notorious 1970s Houston-area serial killer Dean Corll, has painstakingly deployed the latest science to identify victims who had become known as the Lost Boys of Houston. This unforgettable narrative of forensic science, missing persons, and unsolved crimes by award-winning investigative journalist Lise Olsen is expected to be published in 2025 by Random House, an imprint and a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Advance Praise

"Lise Olsen is not only a masterful investigative reporter, she's one hell of a storyteller. Her writing jumps off the page. Her sentences are completely dramatic, her character descriptions spot on. I felt a pit in my stomach reading The Scientist and the Serial Killer."

-- Skip Hollandsworth, New York Times bestselling author of
The Midnight Assassin

"The Scientist and the Serial Killer, is a brilliant work of reporting and writing, as author Lise Olsen takes readers on a dark voyage into a mass murder that has haunted Houston for decades. But instead of stopping there, she recounts how one brave forensic investigator finally brought light to families whose private investigations and perpetual grief had been repeatedly ignored by authorities. Olsen's mystery story is impossible to put down, but the families' losses and her heroine's persistence will stay with you forever,"

-- Mimi Swartz, author of Ticker

"The Scientist and the Serial Killer" is a masterwork of crime writing. Lise Olsen has taken a 50-year-old story and made it new and fresh and terrifyingly real... this is a must read. Her brilliantly organized pages turn themselves,"

-- S.C. Gwynne, Author of New York Times Bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell.

"The once forgotten murder victims of a Houston serial killer are lost no more, their stories brought achingly to life in an act of redemptive recognition that is both haunting and heartbreaking,"

-- Ellen McGarrahan, author of Two Truths and a Lie