Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris ebook

The first half of this book is at times horrifying, fascinating, nauseating, and thoughtful. A mass murder is discovered in WWII Nazi-occupied Paris when life is cheap; young men on both sides are dying in battle; Jews are rounded up and packed into the Velodrome, their homes and possessions confiscated; the Gestapo interrogates and tortures at will; young men join the Maquis rather than be taken for forced labor in Germany. A Paris of shortages and excesses, of occupation and collaboration, and la Resistance. A city where Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus write books and produce plays.
In a time such as WWII, murder shouldn't count for much. The police have other things on their hands. Except even in wartime, this murder stands out owing to the quantity and condition of decapitated heads and dismembered body parts found on the premises of a house owned by one Marcel Petiot.
The second half of the book about the Petiot's trial had its moments, but this reader found it hard going and eventually scanned rather than read the last pages. The author wrote an epilog giving his opinion of what happened. He has done an impressive amount of research and this shows.

This book is a bit of a mess. The first half moves along quite well aside from a couple of huge problems-- there is an ongoing sidebar about Camus/Sartre/Picasso that is interesting, but is never looped into the main text and no parallels are ever drawn in any way. I do like being provided with a sort of timeline to set the scene, but it felt like chapters from another book that had nothing to do with this one, and chunks would randomly pop up erratically, and then there was no resolution. Huh? Also, in one of Petiot's earliest crimes, a set of fingerprints was left behind and when he finally did give up his prints in a fit of rage.. the author simply ends the chapter with him storming out. That's it. No mention of whether the prints matched, didn't match, whether they were tested at all or if the records were even missing. Just... nothing. The hell?

The actual timeline of the crimes are a jumbled mess in this book. For a while, they unfold before the reader, but then it jumps forward, backwards and sideways, skipping over months/years with a throwaway line as to what transpired.... ??? Massu, who tirelessly hunted down his man with painstaking research and attention to detail, suddenly disappears in one of those leaps ahead. With the throwaway line of his entire career ending in disgrace over a corruption scandal, which is barely delved into, and he is almost totally absent from the court proceedings and the rest of the book. Which, fine, if he was forced out and that's how it was, but in the book he is suddenly MIA and it's as if he never existed. ?????

The French court system sounds like an absolute disaster/free for all, and the sloppy rendering of the court scenes in this book only serve to make it worse. I honestly felt that the author was just tired of it and paraphrased transcripts to get it over with. The author does take the trouble to himself point out all the flaws and conflicts/inaccuracies in the testimonies and evidence.. but it feels very haphazard and refers to the witnesses by their first or last names at various times without any uniformity, making it even more confusing. I had mostly given up on it, but near the end when he suddenly details the part about Petiot mysteriously hiding things in the coffins [which had happened waaaaay before and was relative to the events described] I was really irritated. Why are you hiding things from the reader, for a big reveal? This book is an analysis of the crime, not a mystery, it completely fell flat and seemed stapled on and sloppy.

Petiot is constantly described as "brilliant" and "witty" in both reviews and the book itself... which I found him to be neither at any time, ever. He seemed to be an emotionally unstable sociopath who should have been caught ages before he was. Granted, the Nazi occupation really confused everything and made the perfect cover for a smooth-talking murderer, but he could not have been more obvious/clumsy and left a trail of clues everywhere he went. Beyond amateur hour. Even before the Nazi occupation, his crimes were obvious and he only escaped imprisonment/conviction through moving away and incompetence of local officials. There seemed to be lots of incompetence all around-- the police, prosecution and defense. Just a huge mess. How brilliant was he? After an expert had testified that yes, the handwriting on postcards received appeared to have been written by the victim after their supposed disappearance, casting doubt on whether Petiot had murdered them after all, he couldn't help himself and announces in open court that he had forged some of the postcards.. apparently with proud glee that he had done such a great job that he'd fooled an expert. In open court. In the middle of his trial. After an expert decided in his favor and they'd moved on to something else. That's how 'brilliant' he was. Somehow, he is found guilty on nearly all counts, which was almost a surprise considering what a disaster the court case was, a melee of supposition and angry retorts. Although nearly all of the evidence is circumstantial and some of the eyewitness testimony is pretty iffy... it is overwhelming and he is so obviously guilty and insane. Culpable, but insane. A true sociopath, justifying everything he did while conflicting himself constantly, often with lies that made no sense or were easily disproved. Brilliant, no. Lucky, yes.

It is an interesting story I hadn't heard before, and I imagine wading through French transcripts was kind of an endless nightmare, but this book needs a serious re-edit and polish.

David King is to be commended for recalling to memory an all but forgotten chapter of relatively recent Paris history -- the grisly and methodical murders of 60+ men, women, and children, many of them Jews trying to escape Nazi-occupied France. This is a story to make grown men cry, but King's writing style is sharp, direct, and unemotional -- perhaps a little too detached, since the reader never really is able to penetrate the sick, twisted mind of the perp, Marcel Petiot.

Some reviewers have expressed disappointment that the killer's identity is revealed in the first couple of pages. I didn't find that to be a problem--after all, this is a true story torn from the headlines of Occupied Paris. Instead, the elements of suspense are reserved for other aspects of the story, such as what happened to the loot that Petiot stole, what precise method did he use to snuff the life out of his victims (we are led to believe for much of the narrative that they were injected with some kind of poison), and what was the purpose of the sinister-looking lens in the basement.

But as much as I enjoyed the book, I have to subtract two whole stars for King's inexplicable failure to finish out the story of Raphael K., who, remarkably, managed to escape from Petiot's chamber of horrors and went on to write a letter about his experience dated 1944. HOW on earth did he escape when Petiot had him, literally, chained to the wall? Why did he not go to the police? I can't for the life of me understand why an editor did not point out this glaringly obvious omission and ask the author to complete Raphael's story. Do we know if others manage to escape? What a shame that this fascinating chink in Petiot's armor is not explored at all.

In writing "Death in the City of Light," David King had very promising material with which to work. The place is Paris, the time is during and immediately after the German occupation of the city in World War II, and the central character is a bizarre doctor who, after a botched murder trial, is eventually beheaded as a serial killer. So I found it surprising and strange that Mr. King produced a book that is so tedious and flat in tone. There is little sense of drama in his narrative, and it is difficult to keep track of the many characters and the sequence of events, The "true crime" of this book is the author's failure to produce something that is in any way memorable. A disappointment!