Ted Bundy holds a kind of spell over the Northwest, Gregg Olsen said, and that’s a big reason why the acclaimed Olalla author chose Bundy’s legend as the basis for his latest crime novel.

“Fear Collector,” the sixth thriller from the New York Times-bestselling author, tells the story of two women in Tacoma. One believes her sister may have been murdered by Bundy during the killer’s spree in the mid-1970s; the other is one of Bundy’s admirers who raised her son to believe the serial killer is his father.

“If you want to say there was a best serial killer,” Olsen said of the notoriously handsome and charismatic Bundy, “in our modern times, he was the best.”

Olsen said much of the inspiration for “Fear Collector” came from memories of when he lived in the Northwest in the 1970s as Bundy, who was raised in Tacoma and lived for several years in Seattle, was suspected of killing many women in Washington and Oregon.

Olsen’s parents drove him to Lake Sammamish when he was a child, the day after the remains of one of Bundy’s alleged victims were found there. The parking lot already was overcrowded by the time they arrived.

The family lived in Bellevue at the time, and Olsen remembers thinking Bundy could be driving past his house before and after his murders.

“He could have had a head in the back of his car,” Olsen recalled imagining. “It was happening all around us.”

Olsen said his novel touches on the ongoing local preoccupation with Bundy’s crimes.

“I’ve met so many people that claim a connection to him,” Olsen said. “We can easily imagine a mother or a sister or someone being killed by him.”

For his generation of Northwesterners, Olsen said: “Ted Bundy was the real boogeyman.”

The Northwest is used to stories about serial killers, said Olsen, who started his career as a true-crime writer and documented local and national murder cases. He said the prevalence is partially due to prominent killers from the region, such as Bundy or Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, but it’s also due to the large number of crime writers who live in Northwest, including Jack Olsen and Ann Rule.

“There was a time period when, whenever a body dropped (in the Northwest), if it was a halfway decent case, someone would write a book about it,” Olsen said.

The weather and natural setting of the region also lends itself well to thrillers and stories of murder,” Olsen said.

“I love the gloom,” he said. “It is conducive to storytelling, for something dark and scary.”

Although he’s written several other novels and many nonfiction accounts of real crimes, “I’ve never written a book like this,” Olsen said.

He read several books about Bundy before he started “Fear Collector,” and he also drew inspiration from the stories of what he called “Bundy groupies,” the women he remembers from daytime talk shows who became drawn to Bundy romantically after his arrest.

In fact, Bundy later married one of his admirers from prison and got her pregnant.

Olsen didn’t discuss any of Bundy’s real-life victims out of respect for their families.

“I didn’t want to be exploitative,” he said.

What keeps drawing him back to crime stories, and particularly this one, is the experiences of the people who know victims of murder, Olsen said. He just finished work on another true-crime book, an account of the missing-persons case of Puyallup’s Susan and Josh Powell, and he soon will launch a new series of novels centered on a supporting character from some of his other books, Kitsap County medical examiner Dr. Birdy Waterman.

“The part that I find poignant is that I know families hurt forever when someone is taken by murder,” Olsen said. “They become this ghost in every moment of their lives. I think there’s a realness to that, even when it’s in fiction.”