About Holly Tucker
The granddaughter of French immigrants and Professor of French History at Vanderbilt University, Holly Tucker writes extensively on true crime in early Europe. She lives in both Nashville, Tennessee and Aix-en-Provence, France, chronicling her adventures in the South and the South of France in her journal along the way.
Holly’s most recent book, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (W.W. Norton), follows the first police chief, Nicolas de la Reynie, as he works tirelessly to root out organized crime in the city only to find a cabal of poisoners, witches, and unholy priests whose dark works go all the way to the gilded halls of Louis XIV’s Versailles. From La Reynie’s personal notes, interrogation records, torture accounts, and other memoirs comes an unforgettable true account of wicked deeds and dark souls in the City of Light.
Holly is also the author of Blood Work (W.W. Norton, 2011), a story set in seventeenth-century London and Paris about political infighting, professional backstabbing, and the struggle to control the most powerful commodity in seventeenth-century Europe: knowledge, and Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France (Wayne State University Press, 2003), which tells of how male medical authorities and female literary authors struggled to describe the inner workings of the unseen – and competed to shape public understanding of it
Books by Holly
City of Light, City of Poison
Appointed to conquer the “crime capital of the world,” the first police chief of Paris faces an epidemic of murder in the late 1600s.
From secret courtrooms to torture chambers, City of Light, City of Poison (W.W. Norton) is a gripping true-crime tale of deception and murder. Based on thousands of pages of court transcripts and La Reynie’s compulsive note-taking, as well as on letters and diaries, Tucker’s riveting narrative makes the fascinating, real-life characters breathe on the page.
Blood Work
On a cold day in 1667, the renegade Jean-Baptiste Denis plucked an insane man off the streets of Paris and transfused him with cow’s blood. A few days later, the patient was dead – and the transfusionist soon faced murder charges…
Set in seventeenth-century London and Paris, Blood Work (W.W. Norton, 2011) is a story of political infighting, professional backstabbing, and the struggle to control the most powerful commodity in seventeenth-century Europe: knowledge.
Pregnant Fiction
Pregnant Fictions (Wayne State University Press, 2003) tells of how male medical authorities and female literary authors struggled to describe the inner workings of the unseen – and competed to shape public understanding of it.
In illuminating the gender politics underlying dramatic changes in reproductive theory and practice, Tucker shows just how tenuous the boundaries of scientific “fact” and marvelous fictions were in early-modern France.