The Devil in the White City

“The two parts don't always mix very well,” running parallel more than intertwining, which is not what the marketing promises. Roughly seventy percent is fair-planning and architecture, and the committee chapters are where “it gets dry and parts drag,” with the whole “a lot to digest.” The murder sections settle into a predictable rhythm: “create alias, acquire assets through scams, kill victims, repeat.” The serious objection is that “the chapters describing Holmes's murders are merely conjecture,” narrated as documented fact when Larson's “imaginative touches sometimes go farther than the sources warrant,” something he concedes only in the endnotes. One critic found “little sense of pacing or focus.”