The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson published The Devil in the White City in 2003. It is a work of non-fiction about the Chicago world's fair of 1893 and about the period around it, and it tells two histories at once. It is divided into four parts, three of them in Chicago between 1890 and 1893.

The first history is the fair itself. Daniel Burnham, the architect behind it, ran into one obstacle after another, including a fire, trouble making the buildings safe and a shortage of money, and the book follows him through the years of work that produced the White City of the title.

The second is H. H. Holmes, a man widely described as the first American serial killer and thought to have killed a number of people during those same years, many of them women drawn to Chicago by the fair. The two accounts run alongside each other throughout, moving between the fairground, the city and the rooms where the crimes took place, and the book closes in Philadelphia a couple of years afterwards.