Val K. and the Murder Castle

Chicago, 1891–1896—a city expanding faster than it can understand itself.  Steam whistles, tenement stoups, the smell of coal, the clang of horsecars.  Immigrants crowd the Near-west Side, carrying their language, their saints, their griefs, and their hopes.  In the midst of this restless, muscular city rises the most extraordinary and terrible building of the decade: the three-story labyrinth lat...