When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791–1977

Despite its appealingly gory subject, Mercer's uneven history of the guillotine is too poorly organized to be truly informative. Arriving in rough-and-tumble Marseille in 1968, Tunisian-born Hamida Djandoubi lost his leg in a 1971 tractor accident. During his convalescence the handsome, seductive Djandoubi met Elisabeth Bousquet, a naïve, lonely teenager, and soon forced her into prostitution. By 1974, Djandoubi had acquired two underage girlfriends, whom he made assist in Bouquet's gruesome murder. Executed on September 10, 1977, Djandoubi was the last man to be guillotined before France abolished the death penalty in 1981. But Mercer (Time Was Soft There ) continually interrupts the flow of his account of Djandoubi's life and crimes with chapters about the evolution of capital punishment, including Hammurabi's Code, which in 1760 B.C. introduced the “eye for an eye” law of retaliation, and the invention of mechanized decapitation by France's Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin in 1791. The conversational style makes for an entertaining read, but those hoping for an in-depth study of capital punishment in France should look elsewhere. 8 pages of b&w photos. (July)