Review by New York Times Review
THREE months before Day, in 1944, some Parisians in the chic 16th Arrondissement started complaining about thick smoke with an acrid smell emanating from the stately town house at 21 rue Le Sueur. Worried about a chimney fire, one neighbor finally called the authorities. They discovered that the mansion's basement was festooned with human bones, its coal stove burning body parts. A smaller outbuilding housed a mysterious, virtually soundproof triangular room. The former stable hid a pit about 10 feet deep filled with quicklime and rotting flesh. Thus was uncovered one of history's most macabre bouts of serial killing. The official victim count was 27; other estimates ranged sharply upward. The investigation soon centered on the building's owner, Marcel Petiot, a quick-witted, charming doctor with a checkered past. Petiot finagled state reimbursement for unorthodox treatments, often double-dipping by charging patients too, and was implicated in narcotics dealing. He also claimed to be part of a Resistance organization helping people, especially Jews, escape Nazi Europe, for a sizable fee. But as Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, chief of the Brigade Criminelle, discovered, few if any of Petiot's clients made it to their destinations. The increasingly rich Petiot collected their money and possessions, which he stashed at several properties he had somehow acquired around the Nazi-dominated city. As the inevitable media frenzy began, the unavoidable question in occupied Paris soon arose: Was Petiot working for the Gestapo? The Resistance? Both? Or neither? David King, the author of "Vienna, 1814," has more than just fresh eyes and imaginative speculation to power his revisiting of this long-forgotten true crime. Piqued by a contemporary account he found at an antiquarian bookshop, he gained access to the extensive police records of the case, which had been classified for six decades. The wealth of quotidian detail suffusing his well-paced narrative is one rewarding result of his sifting. Another is the sweeping cast of characters in "Death in the City of Light": they reflect the moral, political and personal tangles in Paris that the Nazi occupation fostered and that the French, after liberation, selectively pursued or buried. Occupied Paris became a Nazi Babylon, and the French police were firmly under Gestapo control. Massu, a real-life model for Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, initially assumed the Gestapo was behind the carnage at 21 rue Le Sueur, so until he received German orders, he delayed drawing up a warrant for Petiot's arrest or even trying to question him. Nor did Massu dare to question Henri Lafont, an underworld chieftain with tantalizing links to Petiot. Lafont, Massu knew, worked with the Germans to infiltrate the Resistance, search for downed Allied airmen and ransack the French economy; after becoming a naturalized German citizen and an SS member, he was untouchable. After liberation, Massu, like many of his colleagues, was jailed as a collaborator. (He was eventually exonerated and reinstated.) Meanwhile, Petiot, whom the Gestapo had jailed and tortured as an alleged Resistance member in 1943, evaded arrest by the French police for seven months. During his final weeks at large, he had successfully masqueraded as a Free French Army officer investigating himself. Covered by newspapers and magazines in this country, Petiot's 1946 trial was more farce than quest for truth. Under French law, attorneys representing interested civil parties, like the families of the disappeared, had the right to jump into the proceedings willy-nilly. So they joined the muddled prosecutors, the defense attorney (an expert at deflecting telling legal points) and the defendant himself in trading bons mots, insults, allegations and insinuations. This judicial circus trampled over potentially useful lines of inquiry and evidence. The verdict declared Petiot guilty, and he was sentenced to death. But many key questions remain unanswered. Among them: Who was Petiot working with? King concludes that Petiot was a "self-appointed executioner for Hitler," and fashions a suggestive argument from informed conjecture and circumstantial evidence. But as with so much during the occupation, the full answer may have been more complex and revealing than the French wanted to know. Was the killer working for the Gestapo? The Resistance? Both? Or neither? Gene Santoro's most recent books are "Myself When I Am Real," a biography of Charles Mingus, and "Highway 61 Revisited," an essay collection about American music.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 2, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Just about every nonfiction book about a serial killer on the loose in a big city published since 2004 has been hailed as another Devil in the White City. Erik Larson's tour de force of narrative nonfiction hasn't been matched until now. European-history scholar King, author of the acclaimed Vienna, 1814 (2008), has found a villain who, like businessman H. H. Holmes in White City, was admired and trusted and thrived in an atmosphere of genteel chaos. For Holmes, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 provided young female victims. King's subject, respected doctor Marcel Petiot, tortured and dismembered at least a score of victims during the WWII Nazi occupation of Paris. Many of those were Jews, who came to Petiot seeking refuge from the Gestapo. King deftly adopts a Poe-like, thoroughly eerie tone in his opening depiction of the contents of the basement of a town home in a still-fashionable Paris neighborhood in 1944 and maintains it throughout. He follows the investigation led by Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu of the French homicide squad through the search for Petiot and his trial. The French Prefecture de Police allowed King access to the entire Petiot dossier, which had been classified since his trial. While painstaking in its research, the book has a top-notch thriller's immediacy and power to make one gasp. True-crime at its best.--Fletcher, Conni. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1944, when Parisian police entered a mansion littered with dismembered, rotting bodies, they thought of the Gestapo, but it turned out to be a purely French affair. Historian King (Vienna 1914) has mined the resulting global media circus (not only in France; Time magazine covered it) and extensive official records to tell a gripping story. The villain was a textbook psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot: a charming but heartless liar. Despite spending 20 years in and out of police courts, he won elections to local offices in the provinces only to be dismissed for petty crimes. Moving to Paris, he sold narcotics to addicts under the guise of treatment. During the German occupation, he offered to smuggle people out of France, murdering them when they arrived for the journey carrying their valuables. He went to the guillotine proclaiming himself (despite overwhelming evidence) a resistance hero, who killed only Nazis and collaborators. This fascinating, often painful account combines a police procedural with a vivid historical portrait of culture and law enforcement in Nazi-occupied France. Illus. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The gripping narrative of a twisted serial killer preying on the most vulnerable citizens of Paris during the Nazi occupation.In King's third work of historical nonfiction (Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna, 2008, etc.), he turns to World War II and the city of lights, narrating a frightening tale. When a chimney fire led to the discovery by Paris police of countless bodies hacked into pieces, they immediately suspected the home's owner, the respectable doctor Marcel Petiot, of committing these unspeakable crimes. A manhunt ensued, and Petiot managed to elude authorities for a time. Set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Normandy and the Nazi's retreat from Paris, King successfully weaves together the search for Petiot with the world-changing events surrounding the chase. The second half of the narrative focuses on Petiot's trial, during which the atmosphere in newly liberated Paris had changed drastically. The author demonstrates that while Parisians were ecstatic to be free from Nazi occupation, the stink of collaboration was everywhere. People were desensitized to the details of Petiot's crimes because of the abhorrent details that had reached them of the Nazi treatment of Jews. King writes history in an engaging manner; the narrative is fresh and clear, told succinctly, but with a befitting level of detail. The tale never drags as the author accelerates the suspense, revealing Petiot's staggering crimes at an appropriately stirring pace. However, King succeeds in never allowing Petiot's murders to overwhelm their context.The author's successful transition into the true-crime genreexpertly written and completely absorbing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
