The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

Salon.com and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction. Mr. Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Both novels had a lot to recommend them; in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006’s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel).

In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq. (Keep reading …)