Erik Larson

There’s a quintessential dichotomy about the American big city: a place where smart or lucky nobodies strike it rich, and where the unlucky and rootless get swallowed up. Larsen’s Devil In The White City, a finalist for the National Book Award, tells of two men of 1890s Chicago who embodied that split: Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World’s Fair, and H.H. Holmes, the nation’s first and perhaps deadliest serial killer. The two men didn’t know each other, but both used the megalopolis to get what they wanted. Burnham and his team created a sparkling city-within-a-city that drew amazed crowds from around the globe—a testament to Chicago’s creative and commercial power. The city also brought Holmes a steady supply of victims who disappeared into the block-long mansion he converted into a secret death factory, a ghastly parody of the slaughterhouses that fueled Chicago’s wealth. Larsen skillfully weaves his factual history together as if it were a thriller. (A minor aside: He also tells us that Holmes’ second wife, a Minnesotan, preferred him to Twin Citian suitors since “in Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days.” Ouch.)