Alec Banks: Saints, Sinners, and Cyanide, Gebunden

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Saints, Sinners, and Cyanide tells the electrifying true story of two simultaneous poisonings in 1916 Chicago-one a cold-blooded killing in a snowbound aristocratic wood, the other an audacious mass assassination attempt at one of the city's most exclusive dining clubs.

In an era when poison was the weapon of choice for cowards, jealous lovers, and men seeking to erase inconvenient women, the death of 18-year-old Marion Lambert sent shockwaves through Chicago's privileged enclaves. Found lifeless in a frozen forest preserve, a vial of cyanide nearby, the question lingered like a ghost in the pines: was it suicide, murder, or something more diabolical? Did Marion take her own life in despair, believing herself pregnant and without escape? Or did William Orpet-her high school sweetheart, then a college man at the University of Wisconsin-slip her the poison to silence a scandal? Both had grown up as children of gardeners, tending the manicured estates of Lake Forest's elite, dreaming of something better. But in a world where proximity to wealth bred ruthless ambition and discarded young women like wilted flowers, love could turn lethal. And as the scandalous trial unspooled in a suffocating courtroom packed with socialites and ghoulish pressmen, the line between victim and villain blurred.

Meanwhile, in Chicago's shadowed streets, another poisoner stalked his prey. That same winter, a saboteur calling himself Jean Crones infiltrated a lavish banquet at the University Club, where Chicago's most powerful men gathered to honor the newly appointed Archbishop, George Mundelein, the rising star of American Catholicism. As wine flowed and toasts rose, Crones poisoned the soup intended for the Archbishop. Dozens collapsed in agony-but Mundelein survived. The assassin's prize slipped through his fingers, and Crones vanished into legend, leaving behind mocking letters, cryptic manifestos, and a city gripped by fear.

At a moment when Chicago's Catholic power structures are once again in the national spotlight-with the recent election of Pope Leo, a Chicago-born pontiff-Saints, Sinners, and Cyanideresurrects a chilling, long-buried chapter in the city's religious and political history.

Authorities insisted no one died. But through years of meticulous, obsessive research, Alec Banks uncovered a darker truth: Mundelein may have escaped, but Jean Crones left a trail of bodies in his wake. S aints, Sinners, and Cyanideis the first work to fully expose him as a serial killer hiding in plain sight. Alec Banks weaves these entwined fates into a pulse-pounding narrative of jealousy, forbidden love, anarchist fury, and public spectacle-reviving a true crime saga eerily modern in its obsessions with scandal, class warfare, and the corrosive allure of power.