In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

No one could have done well as the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933, and no one wanted the job, except for William E. Dodd.  An academic who thought the posting would give him time to work on his history of the American South, he was completely unprepared for Hitler's Germany.  Dodd brought his family along, including his daughter Martha who became romantically involved with both Gestapo and Russian Communist officers.  Martha's personal story (Larson used her diaries as a primary source) dilutes the horror a bit, but I came away from In the Garden of Beasts admiring Larson's skill as a writer but too disturbed to have enjoyed the book.

Thunderstruck

I really enjoyed Erik Larson's Devil in the White City.   Larson's dual-track narrative tied together the planning and building of the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the murders H. H. Holmes committed there without feeling forced.  Larson used the same technique in Thunderstruck, with less success.  Thunderstruck ties Guglielmo Marconi's invention of the wireless telegraph with Hawley Crippen's murder of his wife.  The tie is obvious - Crippen, escaping Europe on the SS Montrose with his mistress (who was disguised as a teenage boy) was the first criminal "caught" by the new technology.  Larson writes well, but he's hampered by his material.  Marconi wasn't a particularly compelling character (he was single-minded and jealous - unpleasant on a small, annoying scale), and his work is dryer than the building of the White City.  Crippen is more sympathetic than Holmes, but his murder is more routine (if murder can ever be routine, killing a spouse to end a bad marriage is as close as one can come) and doesn't leave the reader with the creepy feeling that good mystery novels and true crime books evoke.  It may sound like I didn't enjoy Thunderstruck, but I did.  I just pales in comparison with Larson's prior work.

The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City opens on the Olympic, where Daniel Hudson Burnham, one of the architects of the 1893 Great Exposition in Chicago decides to send a message to his friend Frank Millet who's crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction, on the RMS Titanic.  Eric Larson presumes that while waiting word of his friend's survival, Burnham's thoughts drifted back to their great project, the 1893 Great Exposition in Chicago.  One of Chicago's most innovative architects and the man who figured out how to build skyscrapers on Chicago's soft soil, the Exposition committee chose Burnham to oversee the construction and operation of the site, and Larson devotes about half the book to the troubled construction and ultimately successful execution of Chicago's grand step onto the world stage. 

Larson does a good job of describing the difficulties, both political and weather-related, which plagued the construction of what came to be known as the White City, and his description of the Exposition communicated the sense of awe visitors must have felt when they saw the first ever Ferris wheel and the gorgeous buildings filled with curiosities.  He leavens this sense of awe with creepy but engrossing chapters about H. H. Holmes, a pharmacist and landlord whose wives, secretaries, and business associates seem to disappear.  Holmes has an explanation for everything - they went back to their families, or ran away to marry, or followed another business opportunity.  Sure, his apartment building had odd, soundproofed rooms, and maybe the gas jets looked a bit odd, but no one put anything together.

No one, that is, until 1895 when Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia detective investigated a case of insurance fraud.  H. H. Holmes had taken out insurance policies on his business partner Benjamin Perzel, who disappeared soon afterward.  Holmes then took Perzel's children on a trip from which they never returned.  This last section reads like a tightly written police procedural, with solid detective work and a few lucky breaks.  Geyer captured America's first known serial killer.