One afternoon in Paris, 1889, a dandyish court official with a penchant for young women finished his absinthe and declined his dining companions’ invitation to the massive (and massively popular) International Exposition. Dominating the streets and social life of the city, the giant fair spanned 200 acres and drew tons of visitors who strolled the stands and the oddities of the fair, gawking up at the newly erected Eiffel Tower, created specially for the event.

The man at dinner was Augustin Gouffé. His official title was bailiff, but he was more like what we’d describe today as an unscrupulous attorney. Gouffé did not have long to live -- he was about to meet the Little Demon.

Steven Levingston is the nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post. His new book, Little Demon in the City of Light, describes Belle Époque Paris of the late nineteenth century with fine historical detail and a tasteful touch of sensationalism. It's a bustling Paris in danger of crumbling over its own excess, with a cast of characters worthy of a Balzacian epic or a Simenon mystery.

Onto this stage walks Levingston’s Little Demon, Gabrielle Bompard, who helped her brute lover Michel Eyraud murder Gouffé, shove his body in a trunk, and have the thing dumped (oozing bloody goop from its cracks) in the countryside. When Gouffé goes missing, detective Marie-François Goron is on the case, which is immediately scandalous and unusual, and grows darker and stranger.

As the case develops, what’s thought to be a case of death by hanging is revealed to have been by strangulation, but other details are murky. Levingston is most interested in Bompard’s claim that she is not culpable for her assistance in the murder because she’d been hypnotized by Eyraud, as were the tabloids of the time.

There’s no question that Eyraud and Bompard did it. Like an episode of Columbo, we know whodunnit, but we watch to see how they’re caught. Bompard becomes a shameless celebrity (a more sinister Lindsay Lohan, maybe), and the case captures the public’s imagination to the extent that before it’s even closed, a museum erects a replica of the crime scene to attract visitors. Recreating the scene all over again more than a century later, Levingston has a similarly sharp sense of how to draw his audience in, but his well-researched, crisply written account is no publicity stunt.