Death in the City of Light
"A new masterpiece of true crime writing . . . Just shy of setting a new standard for the form."
-Laura Miller, Salon.com
Death in the City of Light is the gripping true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Dr. Marcel Petiot was, by day, a handsome and charming physician with remarkable charisma. By night, he preyed upon the most vulnerable people of society with unspeakable deviousness. It was in the basement of his townhouse that the French police discovered a macabre spectacle of skulls, bones, and dismembered body parts. The doctor took flight and thus began an eight-month manhunt into a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, Resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, traitors, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. Dr. Petiot was eventually captured and charged with twenty-seven murders, but in the sensational trial that followed, his brilliance and wit threatened to win the day.
Drawing on many new sources, including the massive classified French police file, Death in the City of Light is an unforgettable evocation of Nazi-occupied Paris and a harrowing exploration of murder, betrayal, and evil of staggering proportions.
Vienna 1814
"A sensuous account of the conference that moves gracefully between negotiating tables,
salons and ballrooms."
-San Francisco Chronicle
Vienna 1814 is an evocative and brilliantly researched account of the most audacious and extravagant peace conference in modern history. With the feared Napoleon Bonaparte presumably defeated and exiled to the small island of Elba, heads of some 200 states gathered in Vienna to begin piecing together the ruins of his toppled empire. But the unprecedented gathering soon degenerated into a glittering Vanity Fair -- a seemingly endless stream of personal vendettas, long-simmering feuds, and romantic entanglements. The intrigues and negotiations abruptly halted when word arrived that Napoleon had escaped. In the end, the hard-fought policy decisions would shape the destiny of Europe and lead to the longest sustained peace the continent would ever see.
Finding Atlantis
"King is marvelous at elaborating Rudbeck's theories . . . [and] tells his tale with the pace and appeal
of a classic whodunit."
-Publishers Weekly
In 1679, the Renaissance man Olof Rudbeck stunned the world. He proposed that an ancient lost civilization once thrived in the far north of his native Sweden: the fabled Atlantis. Rudbeck would spend the last thirty years of his life hunting for the evidence that would prove this extraordinary theory.
Chasing down clues to that lost golden age, Rudbeck combined the reasoning of Sherlock Holmes with the daring of Indiana Jones. He excavated what he thought was the acropolis of Atlantis, retraced the journeys of classical heroes, opened countless burial mounds, and consulted rich collections of manuscripts and artifacts. He eventually published his findings in a 2,500-page tome titled Atlantica, a remarkable work replete with heroic quests, exotic lands, and fabulous creatures.
Three hundred years later, the story of Rudbeck's adventures appears in English for the first time. It is a thrilling narrative of discovery as well as a cautionary tale about the dangerous dance of genius and madness.