Cults That Kill

From the jungles of Guyana to a cave beneath Penza, from a Mexican ranch of human sacrifice to the polished offices of a sex-trafficking "self-help" empire, Cults That Kill is an unflinching journey into the darkest corner of human belief - the moment faith turns lethal.

In twenty-six meticulously researched cases, Amit Kumar Ghosh reconstructs the rise and catastrophic fall of history's most dangerous cults and the magnetic, pitiless leaders who built them: Jim Jones and the mass suicide at Jonestown; Heaven's Gate and the comet; the Order of the Solar Temple; Aum Shinrikyo's nerve-gas apocalypse; the Branch Davidians at Waco; Charles Manson; NXIVM; the Burari deaths; and India's godmen of fraud and abuse.

Drawing on court records, official inquiries, survivor testimony, and investigative reporting, this is both a gripping narrative and a clear-eyed anatomy of coercion - how ordinary people are recruited, isolated, broken, and led to kill or to die. A definitive, disturbing, and deeply human account of what happens when devotion becomes a weapon.