Kindle Book Du Jour: A Mystery Spiced with Scientific Intrigue

Some Kindle readers, having spent a good chunk of their hard-earned money for a Kindle, look for free books to add to their new e-book library. Others find that they can now afford to read the latest best-sellers for less than than buying them in hard-cover. This Kindle Book Du Jour feature gives you a third alternative, spotlighting backlisted books you might have missed when they were first published.

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. Crown, 2006. Print length: 480 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (181 reviews). Kindle edition $9.66. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In July 1910, a sensational news story spread around the world: An American doctor wanted in London for the gruesome murder of his wife - she was poisoned, flayed, deboned and buried in the couple's basement - was fleeing justice on an ocean liner headed from Antwerp to Quebec City. He was accompanied by a young woman, his lover, who was disguised as a boy. Another ship, bearing the Scotland Yard inspector in charge of the case, gave chase. Through the new technology of wireless communication, which miraculously allowed ships at sea to communicate with one another and with people on land, newspapers far and wide breathlessly reported the chase as it happened. In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the story of the events leading to this moment... Against a panoply of late-Victorian and Edwardian society and with entertaining verve and colorful style, he weaves together the lives of Hawley Harvey Crippen, murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the genius responsible for wireless technology..." - Lauren Belfer for The Washington Post.

Brief Excerpt:
"A note to readers: There is murder in this book, the second most famous in England, but what I intend here is more than a saga of violence. P.D. James in The Murder Room has one of her characters observe, 'Murder, the unique crime, is a paradigm of its age.' By chronicling the converging stories of a killer and an inventor, I hope to present a fresh portrait of the period 1900 to 1910, when Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. 'It doesn't matter what you do,' he said, 'so long as you don't frighten the horses.'"

Also by Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America. Publisher. Print length: 447 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $6.64. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works." - John Moe for Amazon.