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I'm not entirely sure what to think of this and Larson's other book "The Devil in White City". I certainly enjoyed both of them very much; there's no denying that. Yet because they aren't history and aren't fiction, but are something we might as well call "interpretive history", they make me slightly uneasy.

The author assures us in the foreword that "Anything appearing between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document." That's fine, but what am I to make of sentences that imply certain emotions or motivations? Were they gleaned from sources or are they flights of imagination? What about descriptions of behavior or facial expressions? Erik Larson weaves a story that seems to make sense, but would someone else look at the same dry facts and spin the same tale?

Oh well: it's close enough to history to satisfy me. The author says he intends to present a portrait of a period, and I think he did that well. Along the way, we learn the details of a minorly famous murder and a lot about Marconi and his struggles with oceanic wireless transmission. The reader should quickly understand that the murderer was apprehended due to the very recent availability of radio telegraph transmissions from ships at sea; without that, he likely would have escaped. That's the thread that (weakly) ties these stories together.

As in Devil in White City, Larson leads us along in alternating chapters that advance both stories. His attention to historic detail adds spice and gives us the excuse to accept this as quasi-history. I did not like this quite as much as I liked Devil in White City because of the weak relationship between the two narratives, but it is well done, interesting, and certainly educational.

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