words in scarlet ink

The third (and final) book by Erik Larson in 2019 was The Devil in the White City.

Like Larson’s other works, he weaves several different narratives together and highlights how certain circumstances align into a perfect storm for a certain disaster to happen. In this case, the World’s Fair came to Chicago in 1893 and so did H.H. Holmes, the noted serial killer.

The World’s Fair storyline follows Daniel Burnham, in his job to build the fair, and H.H. Holmes, in the building of his murder castle. Once again, Larson’s narrative indicates a perfect storm – one of the reasons Holmes got away with his murder castle for so long was because there were so many people in Chicago in 1893.

I found Holmes to be the most interesting part of the book, but that isn’t surprising considering my interest in serial killers. Holmes was a jack of all trades criminal – he committed insurance fraud, arson, bigamy, grave robbing, and so on, not just murder. Holmes confessed to 27 murders (including people authorities could verify as still living, lol) but ended up being tried and executed for just one – his partner in insurance fraud, Benjamin Pitezel. The number of Holmes’ victims is unknown, but the conservative estimates put his number of victims at 10-34, and more liberal estimates put him at 200+. There’s really no way to tell.

It was an interesting story. Even Burnham’s half of the narrative wasn’t boring, it just wasn’t Holmes’ half. It was interesting learning about the architecture for an event that wasn’t permanent, and ever more interesting learning how Burnham managed it when stuff happened like…his investor died.

Overall, I enjoyed this immensely. Interestingly, Leonardo DiCaprio acquired the film rights to this book some time ago. 2010 maybe? The project has been delayed, but supposedly now is in development to be a television series.

Larson has a couple of other books out, that I admittedly am not in a rush to get to but would probably enjoy. If I had to rank the three I read in 2019, I’d rank them as such:

1. In the Garden of Beasts
2. The Devil in the White City
3. Dead Wake