On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozi re gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette's act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era-discussed and debated so passionately...