The Devil in the White City

Description

By Erik Larson

Chicago, 1893. Two true stories run alongside each other: Daniel Burnham, the architect driving the World’s Columbian Exposition into existence against impossible deadlines, and H. H. Holmes, who built a hotel near the fairground and used it to kill an unknown number of young women who came to the city for work.

Larson tells both from the documentary record, and the fair itself — the first Ferris wheel, the electric light, the crowds — is as strange as the murders.

First published 2003