City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker

Tucker notes in the introduction that she tried not to dramatise the story, instead relying on the detailed notes left by La Reynie, but the story is fascinating even without any additional dramatisation. There was also a lot about the various mistresses of Louis XIV, the sun king.Īlthough this isn’t really about Reynie’s career or investigation (although both do get mentioned), the story of the Affair of the Poisons was fascinating, as was its connection to French nobility. What this book actually is about is a detailed account of how a bunch of people, many of them French nobility, decided to poison and curse one another. At first, I thought that City of Light, City of Poison was going to be about La Reynie and his work as the first police chief of Paris. The result reads like a combination of the most compelling mystery fiction and Dumas's romances of twisted court intrigues.This is one of those books that I thought was about one thing (A) but it was actually about another (B) but B turned out to be so interesting that I didn’t mind that it wasn’t about A. Although many documents were burned by the king himself after La Reynie's death, Tucker draws on other contemporary records to meticulously reconstruct this fascinating chapter in the annals of true crime. The investigation led to the creation of a secret tribunal that imprisoned hundreds and executed more than 30 people. Eventually, he investigated the Affair of the Poisons, a series of crimes involving members of France's high nobility and reaching into the palace. The embarrassment about these deaths led to the appointment of the first police chief of Paris, Nicolas de La Reynie, who began with reforms to literally clean up the filthy streets of the city and to deter nighttime crime with a massive campaign to install thousands of lanterns on most Paris streets.

The book opens in 1665 with the murder of the city's criminal lieutenant, the public official with jurisdiction over most crimes committed in the city, who was stabbed to death by some inept burglars, followed by the poisoning of one of his colleagues, who resolved civil disputes, a year later. Tucker (Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Science Revolution) vividly brings to life a slice of Parisian history in this rigorously researched true-crime epic, set during the reign of Louis XIV.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker