THE KILLER AND FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

A shockingly violent moment in a master architect’s life.

Most Americans have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, a name once synonymous with American architecture. Wright’s buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, are rightfully considered masterpieces. But few these days know that he had been an irresistible magnet for the tabloids of his day, making him one of the first celebrities of modern times; he was targeted by media moguls looking for salacious stories to separate a rubbernecking public from their hard-earned nickels. Even so, modern readers may be surprised by the comparative innocence of the era’s mass media, which clutched its pearls over the architect abandoning his wife and children at the peak of his career to be with Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, the wife and mother of two children of a neighbor and client. Sherman, the author of several histories and true-crime tales of the rich and infamous, was charmed by the potency of the love story at the heart of the book; and thanks to copious quotes from his highly literate subjects and his own masterly tale-spinning, most readers will succumb right along with him. We learn what Borthwick saw in Wright, and we become enchanted by what we learn of her: She was a talented author and translator in her own right, as well as a pioneering feminist. “We do not want to be censored by the community,” she told a journalist, “respond[ing] to the news reports that the couple’s…neighbors wanted to drive them out of town.” All the more devastating, then, when the horrific story implied in the title takes center stage.

Spellbinding and gratifyingly substantive history.