An interesting story about a psychopath, but I have to wonder if books like these don't give this type of person exactly what they want. It's comforting to see them captured and sentenced, but perhaps we would do better to be less fascinated with this sort of person.

Schecter is usually too sensationalistic for my taste. But this one was very well-done despite his habit of repeating certain words and phrases over and over like constantly referring to Holmes as in “archfiend“. Devil in the White City and this one are the best books on the subject.

This book was about 150 pages too long. What should have been a really good story was made boring and tedious.

After reading Devil in the White City, I was fascinated by the story of H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. I couldn't wait to learn more, in great part due to Erik Larson's amazing storytelling ability. I then watched a documentary on Netflix about H.H. Holmes and was fascinated by Harold Schechter, author of Deranged. He made a statement so chilling and true that chills ran up my spine - Human beings are the only animals that don't pay attention to their natural instinct to run when they sense danger. He was saying that this is why many people fell victim to H.H. Holmes, because they didn't trust their gut when being lured to their deaths. It was in this moment I knew I wanted to read Deranged by Harold Schechter. The book itself was interesting, but went on a little too long and in too much detail for my taste. I found myself confused by Holmes's many lies and think I would have preferred a bit of a more straightforward account of what happened (or what they surmise happened). All in all I enjoyed this book.

If I was researching Holmes this would have been 5 stars easy. But I found myself falling asleep to some of the excruciating detials of dates, names, etc.