A review by caedocyon
The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler

3.0

The pacing was strange. The long introduction was a bit of a slog, and spacing the Mona Lisa mystery out as the author did was vaguely frustrating, especially because there wasn't quite enough content to it to justify its prominence in the book. There were lots of interesting anecdotes (like Picasso's involvement in the Mona Lisa affair), the history of the detective novel was pretty interesting, and so was the stuff on the history of criminal identification (from pre-Bertillonage to fingerprints). I'm sure it was tough to get all this to hang together, and the author mostly succeeded. But it was still a choppy read sometimes.