With Thunderstruck, Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City) delivers another adroit double-threaded story of genius and mayhem. At the center of the plot stands Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862-1910), a mild-mannered American-born homeopathic physician who solved his marital problems by slaying his overbearing wife. After slicing up her body, Crippen quickly embarked with his mistress on an oceanic steamer. Enter Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the brilliant Italian electrical engineer and inventor. As Crippen fled across the Atlantic, Marconi took up the wireless chase, which culminated in a two-day race between two ocean liners. Thanks to the new technology, the mass media enjoyed a feeding frenzy of nearly simultaneously updates. Larson covers this literal race to the death (Crippen died on the gallows) with calibrated excitement that readers of his previous books will recognize.