I’ve had this book on my TBR for quite some time, possibly because I really enjoyed his other book, The Devil in the White City (my Goodreads review); possibly because it’s got a link to Mrs McGinty’s Dead (my Goodreads review). Or maybe because of both these reasons.

Thunderstruck is the tale of two men: Henry Crippens, the infamous murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of a wave-based wireless system. Surprisingly, Crippens is the person that garners sympathy more easily – he’s dominated by his wife who seemed like a really nasty person, and the horrific nature of his crime isn’t mentioned till the last part of the book, so I mainly felt sorry for him. Marconi, on the other hand, came across as rather arrogant and overly concerned with making money and building his name rather than treating people right, making it far harder to like him. The stories of these two men intersect when the whereabouts of Crippen is reported using Marconi’s invention.

While there is a natural intersection of both these stories, for the most part, the lives of the two men did not pair well. I raised a similar concern in The Devil in the White City, but there, I could see how the glamour of the World Fair enabled H.H.Holmes to murder without attracting attention, while in this book, it just felt like two stories. Larson does mention in his note to readers at the start that he hopes to “present a fresh portrait of the period 1900 to 1910” through these two accounts, but I didn’t really see it.

Thankfully, both stories are interesting enough that I wanted to keep reading. I prefer the story of Crippen because true crime fascinates me more, but Marconi’s tale was also enjoyable. Overall, I enjoyed this book; it reads almost like a work of fiction but from the footnotes, I can see that it’s also heavily researched. If you like true crime or history, this might be something that you’ll want to pick up.