From his Celebrated Crimes, Dumas tells the real case of Antoine-François Derues, first seen as a sly schoolboy in Chartres in 1751. Grown into a devout-seeming Paris grocer buried in debt, he schemes to acquire the estate of the Lamotte family, and Dumas follows the plot, its victims and the investigation with a novelist’s sense of suspense.
Eighteenth-century true crime from the author of The Count of Monte Cristo. Download the free EPUB.