Put a pile of anything in front of me — shoes, seashells, books — and I’ll robotically start organizing them into categories. It soothes my mind to separate, say, con artists from gangsters, and it makes a jumble of true-crime books on a variety of topics easier to tackle. But since the ones right in front of me are about serial killers, let’s start with those.

Peter Vronsky’s SONS OF CAIN: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present (Berkley, paper, $17) creeps off to a start with a chapter on “The Stone Age Reptilian Zombie Serial-Killer Triune Brain,” slithers through “The Dawn of the Less-Dead: Serial Killers and Modernity” and slinks to an end with a section called “The New Age of Monsters: The Rise of the Modern Serial Killer.” Vronsky’s purplish prose is at its lip-smacking best in “The Rippers Before Jack: The Rise of Modern Serial Killers in Europe, 1800-1887.” Splashed across his broad canvas are fabled butchers like Andreas Bichel, known as “the girl slaughterer” of Germany; Vincenzo Verzeni, “the vampire of Bergamo”; and Louis-Joseph Philippe, “the terror of Paris,” whose grisly handiwork anticipated that of London’s famed slasher by more than 20 years.

Vronsky has an alarming theory about the “enormous glut” of American serial murderers who came of age during World War II and the postwar baby boom. He observes that the offenders who made their first kill during the peak years of “the golden age” of serial killers, between 1950 and 2000, “all lived in the wake of a receding shock wave of humanity’s biggest, most viciously primitive and most lethal war.” In lurid prose, he points out that some of these golden-agers were the offspring of the 16.5 million Americans mobilized during World War II. Although these veterans were conditioned to kill in combat, Vronsky could find no record that any of them returned as multiple murderers, but some of them fathered the serial killers of the next two generations.

Those serial killers, in turn, have inspired the obsessive interest of crime writers. To research THE KILL JAR: Obsession, Descent, and a Hunt for Detroit’s Most Notorious Serial Killer (Gallery, $24.99), the screenwriter and private investigator J. Reuben Appelman spent what seems like a lifetime (10 years, actually) digging into the unsolved case of the Oakland County Child Killer, also known as “The Babysitter” for the care he took in tending and dressing the corpses of his victims. Over more than a year, in the late 1970s, this meticulous monster kidnapped four children, two boys and two girls between the ages of 10 and 12, and held them captive before killing them and dumping their bodies in plain view.