His true crime history, The Midnight Assassin, about a series of murders attributed to the Servant Girl Annihilator that took place in Austin, Texas, in 1885, was published in April 2016 by Henry Holt and Company.

Starring Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey and Shirley MacLaine, the film depicts the 1996 murder of an 82-year-old woman, Marjorie Nugent, in Carthage, Texas, by her 39-year-old companion,[2] Bernhardt "Bernie" Tiede.

When he was eleven years old, Hollandsworth moved with his family to Texas, settling in Wichita Falls in December 1968,[7] where his father served as pastor of Fain Memorial Presbyterian Church.

In the June 2010 issue of Texas Monthly, Hollandsworth wrote about riding past the state hospital in the back of a pickup truck with his friends on Friday nights, looking for patients.

"[9] As he became a teenager, he kept returning to the hospital, volunteering in different departments, even playing his cello for some of the patients, drawn "for reasons I couldn't then explain" to what he described as this "community of odd souls who had never been able to make it on the outside.

His subjects have included Farrah Fawcett,[19] Kate Winslet,[20] Brooklyn Decker,[21] Cher,[22] Sandra Bullock,[23] Kelly Clarkson,[24] Tommy Lee Jones,[25] Troy Aikman,[26] and Lou Diamond Phillips.

[27] A 2010 press release by North Lake College stated that Hollandsworth "regularly works as a ghost writer, producing books and articles for celebrities and other newsmakers.

[31] The low-budget, independent film opened at theaters in April 2012, and has since earned a score of 92% on the user review aggregator and a 7.6 out of 10 on the average rating by critics compiler at Rotten Tomatoes.

[39] The Midnight Assassin, which was named a New York Times bestseller in May 2016, is a history of Austin, Texas in the year 1885 when a brutal serial killer went on a rampage, ritualistically slaughtering seven women over the course of twelve months, and setting off a citywide panic.