On May 1, 1897, Louise Luetgert disappeared. Although no body was found, Chicago police arrested her husband, Adolph, the owner of a large sausage factory, and charged him with murder. The eyes of the world were still on Chicago following the success of the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Luetgert case, with its missing victim, once-prosperous suspect, and all manner of gruesome theories regarding the disposal of the corpse, turned into one of the first media-fueled celebrity trials ...

Get to Know the Illinois City’s Most Vibrant and Historic NeighborhoodsGrab your walking shoes, and become an urban adventurer. Chicagophile Robert Loerzel leads you on 35 unique walking tours in this comprehensive guidebook. Go beyond the obvious with self-guided tours through one of the nation’s most walkable cities, which is equal parts glamour and grit. Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods represent a melting pot—from Little Italy to Greektown, Pilsen to Ukrainian V...

**#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.“As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco ChronicleA Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Cen...

AMERICA’S MOST COLD-BLOODED!In the horrifying annals of American crime, the infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and Berkowitz are writ large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and hypnotized by their monstrous, murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who’s gotten ink for spilling blood, there’s a bevy of all-but-forgotten homicidal fiends studding the bloody margins of U.S. history. The law gave them their just desserts, but now the ...

Although it wasn't yet summer, the temperature climbed into triple digits on June 3, 1925, and Lloyd Russell could not sleep that night. He lived with his mother and his brother's family in a modest three room bungalow on Progress Avenue in a neighborhood call Prospect Hill. Despite the bountiful implications of the place names, Lloyd worried about a mortgage coming due. Despite two jobs, he couldn't keep up, and he couldn't get that off his mind. Before daylight, the temperature still in ...

The true crime story of the Gilded Age revenge killing that shocked New York City and the world—from a New York Times–bestselling author."A terrifically entertaining work of popular history: swiftly paced, richly evocative, engrossing from the first page." — Wall Street JournalIn 1901 Evelyn Nesbit, a sixteen-year-old chorus girl in the musical Florodora, dined alone with the architect Stanford White in his town hou...

FINALIST FOR THE SPERBER PRIZE FOR JOURNALISM – BIOGRAPHYA fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure’s and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm—as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in AmericaThe president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as “muckrak...

"A terrific, original, and important work….Fitzpatrick provides a stunningly fresh look at the impact of JFK's assassination on the American people."—Doris Kearns GoodwinFor Letters to Jackie, noted historian and News Hour with Jim Lehrer commentator Ellen Fitzpatrick combed through literally thousands of condolence messages sent by ordinary Americans to Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. The first book...

Edgar Award Finalist: This "sensational" and "absolutely compelling" true crime tale finally answers the question: Who really killed the Lindbergh baby? ( San Francisco Chronicle).On the night of March 1, 1932, celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. The family paid $50,000 to get "Little Lindy" back, but his remains were discovered in a grove of trees four miles from the Lindbergh house. More than two year...

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.”Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and ...

On the night of March 1, 1932, the infant son of famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow, the daughter of a diplomat, was kidnapped from the family's hilltop estate in Hopewell, NJ. The ensuing investigation involved not only crime fighters at the highest levels, but also members of organized crime, small-time crooks and swindlers, politicians and hangers-on who surfaced from every quarter seeking their own measures of fame and fortune in the mournful glow of the flyer ...

Before Agatha Christie, there was America's Mistress of Mystery. This is the story of her life and creative legacy, from the butler who did it to Batman.In the decades since her death in 1958, master storyteller Mary Roberts Rinehart has often been compared to Agatha Christie. But while Rinehart was once a household name, today she is largely forgotten. The woman who first proclaimed "the butler did it" was writing for publication years before Christie's work saw th...