Skip Hollandsworth knows his way around a crime scene. Since 1989, he has written about a wide range of subjects for Texas Monthly, but his most memorable pieces — featuring bank robbers, disappearing teenagers, murdered prostitutes — are about the grim events that get cordoned off behind yellow tape.

“The Midnight Assassin,” his first book, is about a still-unsolved mystery: a series of murders in Austin, Tex., in 1884 and 1885. It’s peppered with eerie set pieces: A wedding held on the grounds of the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. A baby found at one murder scene, “sitting up, holding an apple, unharmed even though his nightclothes were crimson with blood.” An injured woman fleeing an attacker and screaming, “We are all dead!”

Fans of Erik Larson’s 2003 hit, “The Devil in the White City,” about a serial killer who operated against the backdrop of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, will find similar pleasures here. Mr. Hollandsworth doesn’t have the amount of raw material Mr. Larson did, and he doesn’t have a known villain. But if you don’t mind turning the last page without knowing who done it, this is true crime of high quality.

Mr. Hollandsworth gives equal attention to history and mayhem, to absorbing context and cold fear. His unknown killer struck out against women, mostly with an ax to the head. (Witnesses who survived the assaults recognized the assailant as a man, but couldn’t make a more specific identification.) He started by going after servants, African-American women whose deaths horrified the city and created big headlines but also allowed nervous white citizens in this deeply divided place a hope: Maybe the killer would observe segregation as well.