Library Journal
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True crime author Sherman (Blood in the Water) recounts an often-overlooked tragedy involving one of the United States' foremost architects, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who famously founded the Prairie School of architecture. Less famously, Wright also led a turbulent and scandalous private life. In 1909, while married to another woman, he fell in love with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client for whom he was designing a house. Over the next several years, Wright and Cheney lived together and traveled the world, but their romance would end in bloodshed at Wright's own Wisconsin house, Taliesin. Sherman details the lives of Wright and Cheney and the events of August 12, 1914, when Julian Carlton, a handyman employed by Wright, murdered seven people at Taliesin, including Mamah, and set fire to the house. Wright was away working in Chicago when he was notified of the horrific events and had to race back to Wisconsin. A sheriff's posse quickly apprehended Carlton, but not before he had consumed a fatal dose of muriatic acid. Wright went on to rebuild Taliesin and would live there for several more decades. VERDICT Highlighting a nearly forgotten event in Wright's life, this account of the Taliesin murders will appeal to general and true crime readers.—Chad Statler

Publishers Weekly
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Journalist Sherman (Blood in the Water) recounts the murder of Frank Lloyd Wright’s lover in this fascinating work of true crime. In 1909, Wright made headlines for running off to Europe with his neighbor’s wife, translator and feminist advocate Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney. The couple were hounded by reporters abroad, so when they returned from Europe, Wright built the Taliesin compound in Wisconsin where they lived together happily. Then, in 1914, while Wright was in Chicago designing Midway Gardens, a handyman killed Mamah, her two children, and several of Wright’s staff before burning Taliesin down. Sherman lingers on the mystery of the act—the suspect swallowed acid and died in jail while awaiting trial, so historians remain unsure if he was criminally insane or carrying out a targeted attack—but pays greater attention to the ways that Mamah’s death haunted Wright, who considered her the love of his life. Though he remarried, Wright was buried next to Mamah at Taliesin in 1959. Sherman exhibits both a novelist’s sense of pace and a reporter’s eye for detail in this arresting true crime narrative of great passion and great tragedy. It’s a heartbreaker. Photos. Agent: Peter Steinberg, UTA. (May)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Martha Borthwick Cheney were both married to other people when they scandalized polite society by going off together to Europe. He left behind a wife and several children, and it caused quite a stir. A few years later they were living together in a compound designed and built by Wright, Taliesin in Wisconsin, which the press quickly dubbed a love castle. In 1914, while he was away on business, someone murdered Martha, her children, and several other people, and then burned the compound to the ground. The latest book from the author of Blood in the Water (2025) and A Murder in Hollywood (2024) tells two stories, that of Wright, whose life was turned upside down by the tragedy, and that of the killer, who died by suicide while awaiting trial and whose motives remain mysterious to this day. Told with great compassion and a journalist’s eye for the small but crucial details, this is a first-rate work of true crime.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.