As I write this review, there has been another mass shooting in America, and all the press wants to know is why it was done. (It honestly doesn’t matter which mass shooting we’re talking about; the impulse is the same.) This usually can be accomplished through social media, as the perpetrators know that whatever manifesto or online posts they have is going to be thrust into the spotlight. Worse, there’s the actual expectation from the public that the motivation for the crimes be exposed. If that reason isn’t readily available, it will engender conspiracy theories about why we don’t know.

"Sherman does a masterful job setting the scene and telling the story that we have... THE KILLER AND FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT is a skillful retelling of a horrible moment in the life of an irreplaceable artist and builder."

So anyone reading about the mass murders that took place at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s rural Wisconsin manor, in 1914 is going to be a little disoriented. Casey Sherman does an excellent job reconstructing and retelling the incident, but the only people with any sort of media presence at that time in history were, well, figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick. We simply don’t know much about the culprit. Sherman documents the sketchy information that we do have, but given that there was never a trial and the killer’s wife essentially vanished shortly after, there really isn’t much there other than conjecture.

In THE KILLER AND FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Sherman handles this by focusing on Wright, who wasn’t on the scene for the murders, and his various relationships with the women in his life. There is a lot of material to work with here, starting with his turbulent relationship with his admiring but difficult mother.

Wright married young and fathered several children during his formative years in Chicago, but his relationship with his first wife was not particularly loving, and he wasn’t a notably expressive parent. He fell hard for Mamah Borthwick, a Chicago acquaintance who at the time was married to another man. While this romantic pairing may have passed without much notice in the 21st century, when they left their spouses for a European idyll, it was front-page news in Chicago and around the country. Wright returned to his wife, who refused to consider divorce, but installed Borthwick and her children at his newly built compound in rural Wisconsin.

At the time of the murders, Wright was struggling with the early-20th-century version of “cancel culture,” as his personal life was resulting in a real reduction in his business. It wasn’t until after the tragic deaths of Borthwick, her children, and others working out of the Wisconsin campus that he was able to repair his reputation --- which, ironically, came about due to an even greater tragedy. The Wright-designed Imperial Hotel in Japan survived a hideous earthquake and served as the headquarters for recovery efforts. This led to the masterworks for which Wright is best known today. (And, tellingly, Sherman points out that Borthwick’s murder burnished her reputation as well, at least when compared to Wright’s other future romantic partners.)

Sherman does a masterful job setting the scene and telling the story that we have, even though he can't fill in the blanks about the information that was lost to history. THE KILLER AND FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT is a skillful retelling of a horrible moment in the life of an irreplaceable artist and builder.