The Killer of Little Shepherds (2010)

The Killer of Little Shepherds is like an episode of CSI: 19th-Century France. As he prowled the countryside, Joseph Vacher preyed on young shepherds, ultimately slaughtering four times as many people as Jack the Ripper. How the bumbling French authorities finally pieced together the evidence — while learning to study bodies and crime scenes for clues and to compare details about the killings — 
represents, Starr says, nothing less 
 than the birth of forensic science. In gripping, almost novelistic chapters, he alternates between Vacher and Alexandre Lacassagne, the criminologist who helped crack the case. A–

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