Die in Paris

Book excerpt: Marcel Petiot, France's most famous serial killer A spring night in Paris. The most beautiful city in the world is dark and silent. Uncertainty devils the air. As does normality: war time normality. The Nazis' Swastika flutters from the Eiffel Tower. The Parisians are huddled indoors. Suddenly the night's stillness is shattered by sirens and excited voices. For days foul smoke has been pouring from the chimney of an uninhabited house close to the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Police and firefighters are racing to the house to break down the bolted door. They make a spine-chilling discovery. The remains of countless human beings are being incinerated in a furnace in the basement. In a pit in an outhouse quicklime consumes still more bodies. Neighbors say they hear banging, pleading, sobbing and cries for help come from inside the house deep at night. They say a shabbily-dressed man on a green bicycle pulling a cart behind him comes to the house, always at dawn, or dusk. The house belongs to Dr Marcel Petiot - a good-looking, charming, caring, family physician who lives elsewhere in the city with his wife and teenage son. Is he the shabbily-dressed man on the green bicycle? If so, what has he to say about the bodies? Marilyn Z. Tomlins has crafted an enthralling and suspenseful page-turner about one of history's most fascinating and notorious serial killers. This grisly World War Two era thriller will have you teetering on a slippery edge from beginning to end. Don Fulsom, veteran UPI and VOA White House correspondent, Washington, D.C. reporter, author of the bestseller Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President, and a professor of government at American University in Washington. With style, Marilyn Z. Tomlins' Die in Paris, tells the incredible story of France's most prolific murderer. Readers will discover a truly psychotic serial killer. J. Patrick O'Connor, author of the bestsellers The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal and of Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murder and the Framing of Kevin Cooper, and the creator and editor of www.crimemagazine.com