The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”

“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”

“I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”

“Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.”

“. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.”