Europe

Massie's sequel to Nicholas and Alexandra investigates the 1918 execution of Russia's imperial family and the seventy-year mystery of their remains. He traces the forensic and DNA detective work that finally identified the Romanov bones after the Soviet collapse, alongside the impostors and disputes surrounding the last tsar's fate.

Candace Dempsey investigates the November 2007 murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and the highly contentious prosecution of her American roommate Amanda Knox, who was convicted, acquitted and eventually definitively exonerated. The book scrutinises forensic errors, intense transatlantic media distortion and the cross-cultural misunderstandings that fundamentally compromised the Italian judicial proceedings.

Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi investigate the 'Monster of Florence,' an unidentified serial killer who murdered sixteen people, all couples parked in the Tuscan countryside, over a period stretching from 1968 to 1985. The book recounts the long-unsolved case, multiple wrongful prosecutions and the authors' own alarming entanglement with overzealous Italian prosecutors during their investigation.

Kimberly L. Craft investigates Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman accused of torturing and killing an extraordinarily large number of young women and girls at her castle. Drawing carefully on original Hungarian trial records and witness depositions, the book separates documented historical atrocity from later legend in one of European history's most infamous and contested criminal cases.

David M. Kiely surveys a gallery of notorious female killers in Irish history, from poisoners and infanticide cases to accomplices in violent crimes, examining the social conditions, trial records and cultural assumptions surrounding each case. The book challenges comfortable assumptions about women and violence, revealing a national criminal history that has often been minimised or overlooked.

Susan Mitchell recounts the wartime crimes of Dr Marcel Petiot, the French physician who murdered dozens of Jewish refugees and others during the Nazi occupation of Paris, promising to arrange their escape but instead robbing and killing them. The book details his macabre operation, the incineration of victims in his cellar and his dramatic eventual exposure and execution.

Scott Andrew Selby recounts the wartime hunt for Paul Ogorzow, a Nazi Party member and railway employee who attacked and murdered eight women on Berlin's S-Bahn commuter trains during the strict 1940–41 blackout. The book reveals how intense political pressure to protect the Party's reputation and wartime propaganda imperatives significantly complicated and delayed the pursuit of the killer.

Emmanuel Carrere investigates Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who sustained an elaborate lie for eighteen years—claiming to be a World Health Organization doctor—before murdering his wife, children and parents when exposure became inevitable. The unsettling book is a sustained meditation on self-deception, the social construction of identity and the vertiginous abyss concealed beneath a perfectly ordinary life.

Leonard Wolf chronicles Gilles de Rais, the celebrated fifteenth-century French marshal and companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc who was tried and executed in 1440 for confessing to the torture and murder of scores of children. The book examines his catastrophic moral descent, the medieval judicial proceedings and the question of whether his confession was genuine or coerced.

Lois Jones examines the deeply disturbing 2001 German case of Armin Meiwes, the 'Rotenburg cannibal' who killed and consumed a willing victim he had recruited through an internet cannibal forum. The book probes the trial's unprecedented legal questions around consent, criminal pathology and whether a society can punish what both parties claimed to have freely desired.

Natascha Kampusch recounts her abduction at age ten and the 3,096 days she spent imprisoned by her captor in a hidden cellar near Vienna before her escape in 2006. The memoir is a startling account of captivity, psychology and survival.

David King reconstructs the crimes of Dr Marcel Petiot, a respected Parisian physician who during the Nazi occupation murdered at least twenty-seven people he had falsely promised to smuggle to freedom in Argentina. The book recreates the wartime chaos, black-market fear and profound moral confusion that allowed Petiot's ghastly scheme to operate for years before exposure.

Hubert Wolf uncovers a shocking nineteenth-century scandal inside a prestigious Roman convent involving attempted poisoning, sexual manipulation, false mystical visions and the abuse of religious authority, ultimately investigated by the Vatican's own Inquisition. Drawing entirely on newly opened Vatican archives, the book exposes deep institutional corruption and dangerous human psychology concealed behind cloister walls.

Robert Cullen follows Soviet investigator Viktor Burakov's gruelling eight-year hunt for Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered and mutilated more than fifty women and children across southern Russia. The book exposes how Communist Party ideology, bureaucratic denial and institutional incompetence systematically hampered the investigation and enabled one of history's most prolific and violent serial killers to continue.

Steven Levingston recounts the sensational 1889 'Gouffe affair,' in which Gabrielle Bompard and her lover Michel Eyraud murdered a Parisian bailiff and shipped his decomposing body to Lyon, sparking a landmark debate over hypnosis as a criminal defence. The book captures Belle Epoque forensic innovation, courtroom spectacle and a notorious femme fatale in vivid detail.

Joel F. Harrington recovers the extraordinary journal of Frantz Schmidt, a professional executioner who carried out hundreds of executions and corporal punishments in Nuremberg between 1573 and 1618 while seeking social rehabilitation. The book illuminates evolving concepts of crime, punishment and honour in early modern Germany through the meticulous self-accounting of a remarkable and contradictory life.

Eric Jager reconstructs the 1407 assassination of Louis of Orleans on a Paris street and the pioneering criminal investigation that followed. Set amid royal intrigue and civil war, the book reveals medieval detection and a murder that plunged France into chaos.

Greg King and Sue Woolmans recount the love story between Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie Chotek and their assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, which directly triggered the First World War. The book humanises an extraordinary couple whose murder carried unimaginable political consequences and fundamentally reshaped the entire twentieth century.

Douglas Starr braids the relentless 1890s hunt for French serial killer Joseph Vacher, who murdered and mutilated at least eleven rural victims, with the simultaneous rise of forensic science under pioneering criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne. The book shows how one brutal case helped establish the scientific foundations of modern criminal investigation and legal psychiatry.

Paris hides centuries of murder beneath its elegant façades. These verified tours take you from Revolution-era execution grounds to FBI-profiled serial killers.