Wayne Nance spent twelve years as the seemingly ordinary furniture mover his Missoula, Montana neighbors trusted without question, all while committing a string of sadistic killings between 1974 and 1986 that this audiobook reconstructs in careful, disturbing detail. He treated accessibility as his only real requirement for choosing a victim: a preacher's wife, a teenage runaway, a married couple, anyone within reach of his friendly, unthreatening facade. The book, written by former Wall Street Journal editor John Coston, only exists in its full form because Nance eventually miscalculated, targeting a couple who survived and fought back one September night, unraveling the facade that had protected him for over a decade.
What John Coston Delivers
Coston's journalism background shows in the book's restraint: rather than sensationalizing Nance's crimes for shock value, the reporting focuses on how completely he fooled the people around him, positioning the book as much as a study of small-town social trust as a chronicle of violence. Nan Tuttle's review captures this balance directly, praising 'just the right amount of detail about the crimes' alongside real attention to 'the people that worked and lived around this monster and had no idea.'
Nancy L. Middleton's review adds a genuinely chilling structural note: Nance began killing as a teenager, and had he not died relatively young, in a confrontation following that final attack, he likely would have escalated into one of the more prolific serial killers of his era. That framing gives the book real stakes beyond a closed case; it is implicitly a story about how much worse an already twelve-year rampage could have gotten.
Missoula in the 1970s and 80s was exactly the kind of place true crime readers find hardest to reconcile with a hidden serial killer, a university town with a reputation for safety and neighborliness, and Coston uses that mismatch deliberately, letting the reader sit with how thoroughly Nance's ordinary cover story worked on people who had every reason to trust their own judgment about their neighbors.
Reviewer Nan Tuttle's description of the book as one she 'zoomed through' because it was 'so engrossing' is a meaningful signal for true crime specifically, since the genre lives or dies on whether the pacing sustains genuine narrative momentum rather than becoming a dry procedural recitation of dates and evidence.
Montana's relatively small, close-knit population in this era makes the twelve-year gap between Nance's first killing and his eventual unmasking especially unsettling; investigators were working within a community small enough that many people plausibly crossed paths with the killer personally, yet large enough that connecting scattered, geographically separate crimes to one man took over a decade.
What John Coston Gets Right
I could not confirm title-specific credits for A. T. Chandler, so the assessment rests on genre fit: true crime narration needs to hold steady, unsensationalized authority through genuinely disturbing material, closer to established approaches to dense investigative nonfiction than to a narrator chasing constant dramatic peaks. At eight hours and forty minutes, this is a tight, focused runtime that should support a measured, controlled pace without the material dragging.
The book includes photos in its print and ebook editions, and while an audiobook obviously cannot reproduce images directly, the underlying reporting Coston did to assemble those visual records, interviews, court documents, contemporaneous news coverage, is exactly the kind of dense factual foundation that translates well into narrated nonfiction.
Coston's background as a former Wall Street Journal editor shows in the book's structure as much as its prose; the narrative moves methodically through documented evidence rather than speculative psychological profiling, which gives A. T. Chandler's narration a factual backbone to lean on rather than needing to manufacture tension through delivery alone.
Where John Coston Loses Some Ground
Only two written reviews are attached despite the 4.3 rating, a thin sample for a nonfiction true crime title; both are substantive and positive, but treat the score as an early signal rather than broad consensus.
Because photos are part of the original print and ebook editions, listeners who want the full visual documentary record, crime scene and victim photographs referenced in reporting like this, will need to supplement the audiobook with a print copy; the narration alone carries the reporting but not the images.
This is dual-tagged biographies-memoirs and mystery-thriller-suspense, which fits the material better than a single true-crime tag would, since the book is genuinely doing double duty: reconstructing Nance's specific psychology as much as chronicling the investigation that eventually caught up with him.
The book's title itself, a direct quote about Nance's own stated compulsion, signals the psychological framing Coston is working toward throughout: this is as interested in understanding what drove a seemingly ordinary man to repeat, escalating violence as it is in cataloging the crimes themselves.
This runtime moves efficiently through a twelve-year timeline without excessive padding, which works in its favor for listeners who want a complete account without an inflated runtime more common in true crime nonfiction stretched to fill a longer audiobook slot.
Because Nance died relatively soon after his final attempted attack, the book does not build toward a courtroom trial in the way many true crime narratives do; readers should expect the climax to center on the unraveling of his double life and the final confrontation itself rather than a prolonged legal proceeding.
Who Should Pick Up To Kill and Kill Again
This suits true crime listeners who want journalistic rigor over lurid sensationalism, in the tradition of Ann Rule's work; Jeffrey Schauer's review, recommending it 'very highly to all' on a friend's suggestion, is the kind of word-of-mouth endorsement this genre runs on.
Skip it if graphic descriptions of sexual violence are a hard limit for you, since the synopsis is direct about the 'sadistic sex slayings' at the book's center; for listeners who can handle that material in service of understanding how a community got fooled for over a decade, this delivers a tightly reported account.
Readers of Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, another account of a killer who successfully passed as trustworthy and ordinary within his own community, will recognize the same central unease at work here, the specific horror of proximity rather than distance.
In Brief
- Voice: I found no confirmed track record for A. T. Chandler, but the compact runtime and true crime genre call for measured, unsensationalized delivery.
- Big ideas: Serial killer psychology, small-town misplaced trust, investigative journalism
- Atmosphere: Restrained and disturbing rather than sensationalized
- Worth it?: A tightly reported true crime account best suited to listeners who want journalistic rigor over shock value.
Common Questions
Is the To Kill and Kill Again audiobook graphic?
Yes, the synopsis is direct about sadistic sexual violence at the center of Wayne Nance's crimes, so listeners sensitive to that material should be aware going in.
How long is the To Kill and Kill Again audiobook?
It runs eight hours and forty minutes, a tight, focused length for a densely reported true crime account.
Does this audiobook include the crime scene photos from the print edition?
No. The photos included in the print and ebook editions cannot be reproduced in audio, though the underlying reporting behind them carries through in the narration.
