The Bookkeeper of Death

The Bookkeeper of Death: Henri Désiré Landru In the spring of 1919, Detective Jules Belin knocked on the door of a Paris apartment and opened a trunk that would reveal the most meticulously documented killing operation in the history of European crime. Henri Désiré Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais, had spent five years exploiting the catastrophic loneliness of wartime France, seducing vulnerable women through newspaper matrimonial advertisements, bringing them to isolated country villas, and incinerating their remains in a heavy kitchen stove. Eleven women were confirmed dead. Seventy-two more were never accounted for. He confessed to nothing. The Bookkeeper of Death is the definitive narrative account of the Landru case: the crimes, the investigation, the trial of the century at Versailles in 1921, and the century of cultural afterlife that has made Landru one of the most analysed figures in the history of serial homicide. Drawing on the black notebooks, the railway ticket receipts, the forensic record, and the testimony of the families who refused to stop searching, Mícheál Ó Flaithearta reconstructs not merely the story of one extraordinary predator but the story of the social world that made him possible, a world of institutional failure, structural loneliness, and the enduri