The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Aaron Freundschuh. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2017. vii + 258 pp. £20.99. ISBN 978 1 5036 0082 9.

In 1887, Paris was gripped by the sensational trial of Enrico/Henri Pranzini, the 'gigolo' of Aaron Freundschuh's title, who stood accused of murdering a 'courtesan' named Marie Regnault/Régine de Montille, her servant Annette Gremeret and Annette's young daughter in the apartment that the three lived in on the Rue Montaigne. This gripping account of the investigation and trial will be of interest not only to researchers but also to teachers facing the challenge of finding cutting-edge research on these topics in English. As Freundschuh points out, there is surprisingly little work on the murders in the Rue Montaigne, and this alone would be enough to sustain the book's claim to originality. But Freundschuh does better than this, showing how the Pranzini trial was a 'transformative episode in the history of foreignness in France', which highlights the importance of 'imperial security', or the growing fears that the dregs of the Empire and French colonies were returning to haunt the metropole.