I'll confess: I picked this up because it pays homage to the Thin Man movies. Yep, that's the whole reason this book ever found a home in my library bag. Oh, I might have read it eventually (I'm slowly picking my way through the cozy mysteries) but I would have held off for a bit. And no matter how much I love the Magical Cats Mysteries, I'm still leery at times when animals come into the picture. They can either be done right (the previous mentioned series and The Cat Who series) or really wrong (All Fudged Up).

Err. I don't really know what to say about this book. Really.

Because the audiobook went in one ear and out the other. I remember bits and pieces but it resembled nothing so much as a continuous noise you slowly cease to be able to hear.

Part of it was that I never could quite catch the flow of the text. The idea...I think...was to come at the rise in interest of murder during the Victorian times (and slightly before) from a romantic, almost poetic view. The author framed the cases, many of them the exact same ones covered by Lucy Worsley in The Art of the English Murder, around Thomas de Quincy. It was an interesting take...but I never seemed to reach the point of it all.

Now, I was listening to this at the same time (not reading and listening at once but going back and forth) as The Science of Sherlock Holmes, so it could be I kept confusing the two and simply remember the one I took notes on. But while they shared some similarities, none of it really overlapped at any one time. And wouldn't one be more likely to enforce the other if they covered similar information?

I'm tempted to say this simply isn't a book to be listened to. And while I think there's truth to that, I don't believe it was the only reason. Certainly the narrator was not by any means the worst I've found. I've gotten through truly monotone narrators and still remembered the information.

No, I think some of the fault lies with the writing itself but how much, I don't know. I do plan to attempt this again but read it the next time. But that won't be anytime soon. I may be interested in what the author has to say, but I need to forget how I first encountered it.

After listening to Larson's Devil in the White City (and rereading it in fits and starts in book form), I put all of his audiobooks on my list. As much as I'm enjoying access to notes with the books, I find I enjoy the text read more than reading it myself.

Another aspect of Larson's work I love is how he weaves two disparate histories together till you reach the moment their paths cross. Here the stories were quite separate: Marconi's creation of wireless telegraphy and connecting ships with shore and each other and Doctor Crippen's grisly and sensational murder.