Bookish Diversions: Bound in Human Skin?

Plus Toxic Books, Macabre Origins, Books on a Wheel, Halloween Classics, More

¶ The skin I’m in. Fascination with true crime isn’t a recent phenomenon. Nineteenth-century Europe loved a ghastly murder tale. Take, for instance, the Parisian story of double murder that inspired Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; it was a nonfiction newspaper sensation long before it was a novel.

Or consider the 1827 case from a village in Suffolk, E…