Jaclyn Day's Reviews > Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

One of my strangest guilty pleasures is reading true crime nonfiction. (Brandon calls me the “black widow.”) I think there’s a part of all of us that is fascinated by the extent to which people can snap and do insane, unthinkable things.

The serial killer in this book, Dr. Marcel Petiot, is a particularly nasty case of crazy. The authorities weren’t sure exactly how many people fell victim to him—the number ranges from 27 to over 100—and the cause of death has never been determined either. (Theories range from poisoning by injection to gas.) But, what they do know is that after investigating a fire at one of Petiot’s Paris properties, there were dozens of bodies spread throughout the home—from the basement stove to a courtyard pit.

As if the story isn’t horrific enough on its own, this is also happening at the tail-end of the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II. The Nazi Gestapo, Jewish families seeking to flee the city and Marcel Petiot all intersect in nightmarish, unbelievable ways. Who are Petiot’s victims? Where did they come from? It turns out, that with a few exceptions, most were Jewish residents of Paris who paid him for assistance leaving the country. They never left the abandoned townhouse he used as an operational base.

Unfortunately, while the story is gripping, the book meanders and even bores at times. The writing is often dry and straightforward and that becomes problematic when King turns to describe Petiot’s trial (which takes up a lengthy portion of the book). The afterward, which contains King’s own theory of how Petiot killed his victims, also fails to adequately wrap up a fascinating aside about a man who claimed to have escaped Petiot’s clutches.

It’s not a perfect book, but it is a very good (if disturbing) one.