Life & Wisdom Quote by Ann Rule

Ann Rule is doing two things at once here: staking a moral claim and confessing the engine of her own storytelling. As a true-crime writer who spent decades chronicling murderers and con artists, she’s not offering a sociological finding so much as a narrative position. “Bad women are fewer than men” nods to a culturally familiar script - women as caretakers, men as habitual transgressors - which lets the reader relax into a sense of statistical safety. Then she yanks the comfort away with the kicker: when a woman is “bad,” she’s “fascinating” because she’s “so rotten.” The word choice is blunt, almost gleefully sensory. Rotten isn’t just criminal; it’s spoiled, intimate, close to the body. That’s where the hook lives.

The subtext is about transgression with an asterisk. Female villainy draws extra attention not necessarily because it’s rarer, but because it violates gender expectations. A violent man can be read as depressing continuity; a violent woman feels like a tear in the fabric, a breach in the “should.” Rule is naming the perverse magnetism of that breach while also marketing it: the exceptional “bad woman” as a premium specimen in the display case.

There’s also a self-aware tension between judgment and curiosity. Rule condemns (“rotten”) even as she admits fascination, mirroring the true-crime bargain: we insist we’re here for justice, but we keep turning pages for the forbidden intimacy of motive, mask, and cruelty.