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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label Erik Larson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Erik Larson. Show all posts

Monday, August 8, 2016

Paris! Crime! A book with my name on it

I don't really enjoy contemporary true crime, but I very much enjoy the books of Ben Macintyre and Erik Larson. This new book about the first police chief of Paris sounds like it deserves a place at the top of my TBR pile. Alas, it will not be available until next year.

I love the cover line--Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris--who isn't going to read a book that offers all that?  Holly Tucker is a professor at Vanderbilt University (not to be confused with the singer of the same name), and has written several other historical true crime books. I can't wait to dig into them.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

The Devil in the White City



If you love true crime, you've probably read this by now; if you haven't read it, you should. Erik Larson is a terrific writer and from the first book of his I read, Isaac's Storm, about the devastating Galveston hurricane at the turn of the last century, I was hooked. I haven't read his most recent book, Dead Wake, about the crossing of the Lusitania, but ... it's on my TBR list.

Here's my review of The Devil in the White City, still Larson's most famous work:

The true story of two great events that occurred simultaneously in Chicago—the extravagant World’s Fair honoring the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America; and a series of heinous murders.

This is a tremendously entertaining book for fans of 19th century architecture, the city of Chicago, and true crime.  Larson has taken on a couple of interesting stories and interwoven them in a way that’s not quite totally successful, but which always engages us. His non-fiction prose style is so graceful that it’s a pure pleasure to read.