The crime that transfixed France in the early '90s, however, was a far subtler and more existential puzzle. In 1993, Jean-Claude Romand, an eminently respectable, mild-mannered physician who worked as a researcher for the World Health Organization, killed his wife and their two children in their home near the Swiss border, then drove to a nearby town, where he murdered his parents in the house where he was raised before returning to his own home, swallowing a fistful of (defunct) Nembutal tablets and setting the place on fire. While Romand lay unconscious, investigators discovered that he did not, in fact, work for WHO, that he was not even a doctor and that for 18 years he had been funding his family's comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle with money that his parents, in-laws and other relatives had handed over to him to invest.

Quickly abandoning the notion that Romand's false life covered up a reality of arms trafficking and espionage, authorities concluded that when he was supposed to be working at WHO, he had spent the days, in the words of one newspaper, "off wandering, alone, in the forests." It was that line, that image, that hooked Emmanuel Carrére, a commercially and critically successful French novelist who had just completed a biography of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Carrére wrote to Romand and eventually received both the murderer's permission to write a book about the case and his consent to meet with the author. Carrére also attended Romand's trial.

Although Romand had the blood of five people on his hands (he'd attempted, but failed, to kill his Parisian mistress as well), the murders merely horrified Carrére (as he explains in somewhat conventionally melodramatic terms). What fascinated the writer was the false doctor's strange existence prior to his infamous crime: "What I really wanted to know: what went on in his head during those days he supposedly spent in the office, days he spent, it was now thought, walking in the woods."

Romand's story does have a weirdly symbolic quality, and this slender, unsettling book often reads like one of those enigmatic midcentury French novels, say Albert Camus' "The Fall," a book Romand quoted at length in a letter to a female admirer. (Perhaps French murderers are exceptionally better read than ours, or perhaps 18 years of killing time while you're pretending to be at the office gives a guy lots of time to catch up on the classics.)

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"