I have picked up and put down Devil in the White City a number of times. I just couldn't get into it. Finally, I got the audio version of it since I have a long commute, and thought it might be easier to go that route. I am about 1/4 of the way through the book and I figured out why I had trouble getting into it. There is no dialogue. It is like a documentary in book form. To be honest, it almost appears that he was writing a book about the Worlds Fair that was kind of boring, and then came across the H.H. Holmes story and threw that in there to spice it up--because the two different story lines do not seem to be on any path of merging.