Several factors combine to make this book rival Eric Monkkenon's study of New York as the best history of big city homicide yet published. Start with Chicago in its explosively growing heyday, 1875–1920, its reputation for murderous violence unmatched; add numerous contemporary reports and studies; stir in some theoretical points scored for and against Norbert Elias and the Chicago School of Sociology; and throw in a juicy title from Lincoln Steffens. But the key ingredient is an unmatched collection of primary sources, led by nearly 6,000 detailed police reports, which allow Jeffrey Adler to exercise his interpretative skills with more subtlety and precision than any previous researcher.

Adler deals with a paradox: at a time when other cities experienced falling murder rates Chicago's was going up. But he argues, convincingly, that the key is not the rate but the type of homicide, whose changing nature actually helps to show that the still new city was in fact growing more orderly, its residents responding to the demands of industrial capitalism and adopting middle-class norms of self-control. While Adler criticizes the Chicago School's emphasis on urban anonymity and ‘senseless’ violence – every killing made sense to the perpetrator – it comes closest to explaining the ‘I can lick any man in the house’ bachelor subculture of the 1880s, a time when the barroom brawl was the modal murder. But this type of murder in time gave way to two other forms whose rationale was more easily understood in middle-class terms: first, domestic homicide, increasingly sparked by changing contemporary ideals about marriage and women's roles, and second, the cold-blooded instrumental killing associated with armed robbery and gangs. At the same time, some of the apparent rise in homicide rates is misleading because police and prosecutors were influenced by new standards of humanitarianism and personal responsibility, pursuing or reclassifying previously ignored infanticides, deaths from abortion and, in the dawning automobile age, careless accidents.

The number of cases Adler examines, and the available detail about each, have two advantages. First, they allow Adler to make distinctions within and between types of homicide and their perpetrators, such as African Americans, Italians and others. These murders changed over time, and were related to the nature of work and/or contemporary social expectations. Wife-killers, for example, once brutally savage, became regretful and typically suicidal, as their motives moved past rejecting challenges to masculine prerogatives to brooding about failing to live up to the newer companionate ideals of marriage. Second, the many illustrative stories are full enough to allow the reader to check Adler's interpretations against his or her own, almost always nodding in agreement, and confirming the judgment expressed in the first paragraph of this review.