The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer, Skip Hollandsworth

This book is fine, but it reads like it wants badly to be The Devil in the White City. It's never gripping enough, the murders are never horrifying enough, and the fact that no one was ever caught or even really suspected leads the author to speculate wildly with no conclusions. The writing is a little bit weak. The sheriff realizes his deputy is "about as deep as one of those tacks on the board," -- no, he didn't. It's not as bad as the thing I hate most in historical non-fiction; made up conversations between characters. But man, it's not great, either. The author wants so badly for this to be fascinating and keeps dragging Jack the Ripper into the story for comparison (he was only a couple of years later) but frankly, I wasn't convinced by the evidence presented that the "Midnight Assassin" killings were all done by the same person, let alone by a serial killer, and certainly not by Jack the Ripper. Just go read The Devil in the White City (and then try to sleep, ever again). Grade: C #3 in 2017