Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

ISBN 978-1-4000-8067-0

Book Review

This is a set of fascnating stories, involving real people and real places and times. Larson clusters them around the life of Guglielmo Marconi, the young Italian inventor of long wave wireless commumication. Throughout, he unwinds the details of a particularly gruesome murder, and the way it is ultimately discovered and solved; in the end the murderer and his mistress flee by sea, unaware that thanks to Marconi’s invention the entire world is virtually on board following them hour by hour. On arrival in Canada the doctor is arrested for killing his estranged wife, beheading , disemboweling and dismembering her in a bathtub, then burying the pieces in the basement. Larson brings these real life charcters back to life to fold them seamlessly together with world events. He does the same sort of thing in The Garden Of The Beasts which tells of Berlin pre WW I . He is a meticulous, skillful, capable, author, whose book is well worth reading.