Thunderstruck - Erik Larson

First things first, Erik Larson knows how to research an issue. Sometimes you forget that these things in his books happened to real people. Like Deadwake (you can read that review here), Thunderstruck involves ships and transatlantic crossings. But the similarities really end there.

Thunderstruck follows the progress of two seemingly unconnected events. First, the development of wireless telegraphy by inventor Guglielmo Marconi and the turbulent marriage of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Cora Crippen. 

As Marconi races against critics and arrogant scientists to achieve wireless transmissions across the Atlantic, Crippen and Cora move from New York to London to pursue Crippen's career in homeopathy and mail order pharmaceuticals. Cora, unable to accept her lack of talent, spends copious amounts of her husband's money in pursuing Opera and then local cabaret gigs to little result. She is presented as domineering and belittling of her husband, engaged in extramarital flirtations and affairs. Crippen, small and meek finally takes up with his secretary. And, well, then Cora goes missing, Crippen gets on a Marconi equipped vessel, and the gory remains of a body are found in his basement. 

Crippen and his secretary are pursued through wireless technology over the Atlantic Ocean and arrive, unwittingly, to be delivered in to the hands of the authorities, while a rapt public follows their 11 day journey through news reports made possible by the Marconi technology, thus cementing the use of Marconi's system into the hearts and minds of the once skeptical public. 

Thoroughly researched and well written, Larson does not disappoint.

4/5 Stars.