Released in 2003, Erik Larson’s historical nonfiction book The Devil in the White City tells the true story of two men in Chicago at the time of the 1893 World’s Fair.

“Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century,” a synopsis for the book reads. “The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.”

The synopsis continues: “The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his ‘World’s Fair Hotel’ just west of the fairgrounds — a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.”

The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller lists for most of a decade, ranked as a National Book Award finalist, and won Larson an Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, according to Goodreads.