** spoiler alert ** A nice coincidence that I finished this haunting story during October (when many of the most important events in the book took place) and on the day before Halloween! I have a lot to say about this book. I'd had it on my shelf forever and have been meaning to read it, so I was so happy to finally find the time to get around to it. My ultimate feeling is that I wish Larson had somehow tied the Fair and its surrounding events and storyline more closely to Holmes and the murders. In the "Notes and Sources" section at the end Larson writes that he saw the two stories as a nice juxtaposition of pride and evil and that the two stories parallel each other in that they are both about the extraordinary ambition of men. I just wish that Burnham and Holmes had met or at least that Prendergrast and Holmes were somehow accomplices. I guess that's why this is nonfiction, though-- had Larson decided to novelize the story and make these connections as embellishment the story would lose its luster and its appeal that is rooted in the fact that these events actually took place. I did particularly appreciate Larson's nod to Capote in the last section and I thought it was funny that he calls out Capote for not using footnotes-- seems like that is why Capote called In Cold Blood a nonfiction NOVEL. Anyway, it's clear that I disagree with reviewers who said this read like fiction-- almost but not quite.

Overall I found this to be nicely detailed and well written, but there were some weaker parts in the narrative that seemed incongruous. For example, when Larsen begins to detail Geyer's role as the detective who finally gets to the bottom of Holmes's crimes, he writes that Geyer knows how murderers work and why people kill each other. He says it's rarely for mysterious reasons that people read about. He provides archetypes of murder cases-- wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives, and poor people killing each other for reasons ranging from money problems to love, etc. But then, when the Geyer is in Cincinnati investigating the journey that Holmes took with Pietzel's children, Larson writes that he "knew from experience that making assumptions about the behavior of criminals was always a dangerous thing." That statement and characteristic of Geyer's investigative thought process and tactics clearly does not match the former one-- it's confusing. The former statement is also somewhat about Larson giving himself a bit of a pat on the back for bringing this true crime story back into the popular consciousness.