“You know you’ve encountered a great book when you get lost in the world the author has created. Adam Selzer’s fascinating, exhaustively researched, highly readable book H. H. Holmes is all of that—a creepy take on America’s original serial psychopath. From the opening pages to its riveting conclusion, you’re drawn into this narrative as though reading a Caleb Carr novel. . . . Engrossing, totally engaging, all at once thrilling and chilling. A fresh, new take on what is an old story. Just what the doctor himself—oh, snap!—would have ordered.”
—M. William Phelps, New York Times bestselling author, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer
“Erik Larson brought the serial killer H. H. Holmes to the general reading public’s attention in The Devil in the White City. But where Larson leaves off, Adam Selzer picks up, filling in gaps, replacing legend with fact, and debunking myths. From Philadelphia to Chicago, and even down to Texas, Holmes roamed the country in the late Nineteenth Century, leaving behind buried bodies, missing persons, and unanswered questions, in a trail that ultimately led to the gallows. With meticulous research, Selzer digs deep into Holmes’s story to tell us not only the “how” but the “why,” and he reveals a somewhat unorthodox serial killer by today’s standards: a bigamist, a con man, and a swindler who killed indiscriminately, not merely to satisfy some bloodlust but, more practically, to conceal his larceny and deceit. A fascinating read!” —Mike Farris, author of A Death in the Islands: The Unwritten Law and the Last Trial of Clarence Darrow
"When legend becomes fact, print the legend, the saying goes. A case in point is the story of Dr. Herman Webster Mudgett, who became infamous as H.H. Holmes, the depraved supervillain celebrated as the Devil in the White City. If you want the straight dope, and not just the legend about Mudgett/Holmes, read Adam Selzer's H. H. Holmes—the True History of the White City Devil. You won't put it down."
—Dennis L. Breo, co-author of The Crime of the Century—Richard Speck and the Murders that Shocked a Nation
