Gary Michael Krist is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, travel journalism, and literary criticism. Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade, a book about the 1910 Wellington avalanche, City of Scoundrels, about Chicago's tragic summer of 1919, and Empire of Sin, about the reform wars in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Krist wrote three novels--Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory, and Extravagance.