The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003)

In the Chicago of the 1890s there lived two men, both handsome, both blue-eyed, and both unusually skilled at their chosen professions.  One was an architect, the builder of many of America's most important edifices; the other was a murderer, one of the most prolific in history and a harbinger of an American archetype, the urban serial killer. Although the two never met, their fates were linked by a single, magical event, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Beneath the gore, the smoke and the loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible and others in the manufacture of sorrow. It is the story of the conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness.

Author: Erik Larson was born in Brooklyn in January 3, 1954. He is a journalist and nonfiction author. He is a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has written for many prestigious publications; the New York Times, Harper's and Time magazine, to name a few. He lives a quiet life in Seattle with his blind-date wife and three daughters. He loves to cook, he likes to play tennis, he drinks too much red wine and he enjoys dry humour.

My thoughts: I love Erik Larson, he has an attention to detail and a way of telling stories that get you hooked. He entertains as he educates.  I discovered Erik Larson's works in 2007, when I read his nonfiction thriller, “Thunderstruck”, another great story.

“The Devil in the White City” is two books in one! A historical account and a crime thriller, I could not put it down, I literally devoured this book. The entire length of my time in this book was marked with moments when I would stop reading, only to eat, to rest my eyes or to tend to some other minor interruption. Really mesmerising! I read “The Devil in the White City” in December 2014 for Christmas...No, I assure you, this is not a joke. To me, “The Devil in the White City” is more than just a dark story. It is a historical book that recounts actual facts, two parallel stories: the designation of good and evil. Why do some men use their intelligence to do good and others to do harm?

I picked this book up in Payot on Chantepoulet in Geneva. This store catered well to the Anglophone public and I relished its peaceful atmosphere which was most conducive to spending time to choose a book.  Sadly, it has recently closed.