DEATH IN THE CITY OF LIGHT

By David King (Crown Publishers, 416 pages, $26)

In March 1944, complaints from residents along the Rue Le Sueur in Nazi-occupied Paris about noxious smoke puffing from a townhouse chimney led to a horrific discovery -- dismembered bodies stuffed into a stove and more buried in quicklime in a stinking pit just beyond what appeared to be a torture chamber inside the elegant building. Meanwhile, body parts had been surfacing in the Seine. An investigation full of astounding twists and turns culminated in the arrest of the building's owner, Dr. Marcel Petoit, a popular, charismatic doctor with a checkered past that included confinement to a mental institution and several months in a Gestapo prison. Was Petoit working with the Resistance, as he claimed? Or with the Gestapo, as some evidence indicated? Or was he just a mad genius taking advantage of the shackled, decadent Paris of his day? At the very least, this story would make a fine true-crime drama. But in the hands of historian David King, a masterful story-weaver, it is much more -- a thoughtful and deeply troubling work about how Petoit, a brilliant and almost unimaginably evil serial killer, was able to slaughter scores of people, many of them Jews, unimpeded because the world around him was ruled at the time by a broader and even more brutal evil.

PAMELA MILLER, Night metro editor

THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING

Edited by Dave Eggers (Mariner, 500 pages, $14.95)

It must be fun to be a high school student conscripted by Dave Eggers to find and cull the pieces in this annual collection. Or maybe not. After all, Eggers doesn't say how many they started with to get these 39 entries. That said, most of those that make up the "front section" are little more than lists. Not that they aren't attention grabbers. Good to know, for example, that the Twin Cities' BadNraD, Gayngs and the Goondas make the list of "Best American New Band Names." But it's the solid reporting in part two that makes this book necessary, if not required. "An Oral History of Adama Bah" recounts the true-life terror of a teenage New Yorker arrested and detained for suspicion of terrorism in 2005. Tim Crothers tells the inspiring story of Phiona Mutesi, a 14-year-old transported from her Uganda slum to play at the 2010 Chess Olympiad in remote Russia. Mac McClelland writes about the time she spent with Karen refugees in Thailand. Other pieces challenge assumptions, like William Deresiewicz's address to a class of West Point cadets, in which he says solitude is a necessary ingredient in leadership. Or Daniel Alarcon's fictional "Second Life," which delves into the hopes, resentment and shame of a boy whose family sacrifices for an older brother's opportunities. Even Sloane Crosley's comical examination of how her personality changes under the influence of Paris is insightful. There are throwaways, to be sure, but for one of them to be by Joyce Carol Oates indicates the quality here.

KATHE CONNAIR, COPY EDITOR