* 2025 Taipei Book Fair Award

* 2024 Openbook Award

Convicted of killing three family members and sentenced to death, Taiwan’s only female death-row inmate speaks through interviews, courtroom records, and her personal autobiography. Journalist and author Hu Mu-Ching frames these documents with her extensive research, dissecting the patriarchal assumptions about women and crime that informed the public image of “the daughter-in-law who made the earth tremble”.

Twenty years ago, Lin Yu-Ju, currently Taiwan’s only female death-row prisoner, committed three murders that shook the entire nation. She began by murdering her own mother. The resulting NTD 5 million life insurance payout served to whet her appetite, and within the span of a few months she killed her mother-in-law and husband, both by administering toxic injections. Her story created a media frenzy in which she was portrayed as a cash-crazed murderess who would stop at nothing to acquire more wealth. Soon she was soon known as “the daughter-in-law who made the earth tremble” – but was the story true? Was she truly a cold-blooded killer who felt nothing for her own kin, and brought disaster to the doorstep of her unwitting and innocent family?

Veteran journalist Hu Mu-Ching spent two-and-a-half years in communication with Lin Yu-Ju – via written correspondence and numerous in-person interviews – to finally break through her defenses and gather the information needed to write this book. All the while, she questioned her own motivations, paying close attention to questions of journalistic ethics and potential conflicts of interest. Astoundingly, the author received permission to use Lin Yu-Ju’s autobiography, now available exclusively in this book. Therein, Lin Yu-Ju recounts a difficult childhood at home alone while her parents worked, and a rebellious adolescence. Most importantly, she describes her relationship with her husband, the heir apparent of a wealthy family, and a gambler who often beat her. However, there are numerous discrepancies between Lin Yu-Ju’s autobiography and the accounts given in previous media interviews. Her telling mixes fact and fiction, and it is difficult to discern one from the other.

In addition to Lin Yu-Ju’s letters, interviews, and autobiography, this work of meticulous reporting includes extensive original research sourced from interviews with Lin Yu-Ju’s family and friends, the insurance case manager who handled the payouts, the police who investigated the murders, and the psychiatrists and lawyers who worked with Lin Yu-Ju after her arrest. The author also documents the entire process of the interactions with prison administrators who allowed her access to Lin Yu-Ju.

Throughout this daunting endeavor, the author questioned her own motivations: what exactly was she hoping to uncover? She writes that she never hoped to overturn the case, but felt compelled to understand how the public image of the “daughter-in-law who made the earth tremble” was in some degree a product of patriarchal social structures and narratives that influenced the courtroom account of her crimes. More than just a rare book-length dissection of a true-crime case from Taiwan, A Sketch of a Female Serial Killer is an outstanding work of reportage whose meticulous research, fluid prose, and fine-grained analysis clarifies the role of gender-bias in our understanding of criminal behavior, giving curious readers much food for thought.