The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths.

Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his 'World's Fair Hotel' just west of the fairgrounds, a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. These two disparate but driven men are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to lure scores of young women to their deaths. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. This is the incredible story of these two men and their realization of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and its amazing 'White City' one of the wonders of the world. 'An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep defying fiction' TIME OUT

Devil in the white city book