Given my morbid taste in non-fiction, I was already familiar with the story of H.H. Holmes. Thus I found the story of the fair and its architects far more involving. 
 I found the way the author tried to build suspense by not mentioning the name of a particular personage for several chapters after they were introduced to be kind of cheesy. 
 For more history-related book reviews, see http://www.skjam.com/tag/history/