Joe Corbett was more impressed with Ad’s position than Ad was. A plotter and a planner who didn’t think robbing a bank was worth the effort, Corbett picked a softer target, and on the morning of Feb. 9, 1960, he intercepted Ad at the Turkey Creek Bridge as he was driving to work. Somehow, the kidnapping turned into what may have been an accidental killing, leading to “the largest U.S. manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping.” Although Jett’s chronological narrative is pretty straightforward, certain forensic details, like the use of fingerprint analysis and dental records, should please techno-wonks — as should the fact that the case was solved by identifying varieties of paper stock and models of typewriters.

Image John Reginald Halliday Christie Credit... PA Images, via Getty Images

Did the smog smother the murders or did the murders obscure the smog? That’s the terrible question Kate Winkler Dawson raises in DEATH IN THE AIR: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City (Hachette, $27), her deeply researched and densely atmospheric study of two intersecting events in London, the murder spree of John Reginald (Reg) Christie and the Great Smog of 1952.

It was bitter cold that December, prompting the city’s eight million residents to pile on the coal briquettes and draw close to the fire. At the time, Britain was selling its best black coal to foreign countries and palming off the dirty brown stuff on its own people, who couldn’t afford the better coal anyway. But this cheaper means of heating proved deadly, asphyxiating 4,000 Londoners and leaving thousands more gasping. The death toll was so high that undertakers ran out of coffins. Shifting weather patterns contributed to the disaster, trapping pollutants over the city, grounding planes and suspending traffic. Theaters, hotels and restaurants operated on reduced staff when workers were unable to report; in any case, few of their patrons were willing or able to venture out. Day after day, the “peasouper” hung in the air and the roaring fires burned in the city’s hearths. “Swirls of fog,” Dawson explains, “were romantic and beguiling to Londoners.” And the “affinity for an open fire was virtually a requirement for being British.”

Meanwhile, the fog rolling over 10 Rillington Place proved a satanic blessing, smothering the little garden where Reg Christie was industriously planting the bodies of the eight women he’d killed. (Ironically, he’d enticed some of them into his flat with the promise of a special cough medicine that would clear their smog-filled lungs.) This diligent gardener wasn’t entirely secretive about what he was up to, even using a human thighbone to prop up the garden fence. “ ‘Neighbors watched me digging,’ he said. ‘They nodded ‘cheerios’ to me.’ ” Until he was brought to trial the following year, the infamous “Beast of Rillington Place” may have been the only person in London to delight in the Great Fog.

Any book with “Belle Époque” in the title puts me in mind of Woody Allen’s enchanting fantasy film, “Midnight in Paris,” in which Pablo Picasso’s mistress and her present-day American lover travel back in time to the glorious era when Paris was the playground of great artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas. John Merriman’s BALLAD OF THE ANARCHIST BANDITS: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Époque Paris (Nation Books, $28) tells another story of that era — not the romance of the “Ville Lumière” with its dazzling palaces and grand hotels but the dark tale of a city in the grip of a crime wave. “The guidebooks never mentioned the quartiers populaires,” Merriman notes, “or the impoverished suburbs of Paris, where most of the workers who ran the trams, built the popular new cars and cleaned the city lived.” It took the anarchists to argue, often violently, that working people were suffering from “increased mechanization, the decline of apprenticeship, the increase in piece rates, speedups and the beginnings of scientific management in large factories.”

Image The Bonnot Gang as depicted in the Parisian press.

Merriman’s subject is the rise and fall of the Bonnot Gang, but he shrewdly wraps his historical analysis in the arms of a love story. Rirette Maîtrejean and Victor Kibaltchiche met on the battlements of the class war, which fueled their affair and gave it purpose. But Jules Bonnot, the leader of their gang, was more committed to plunder than to the cause. “Our blood pays for the luxury of the wealthy” went the anarchist battle cry. “Our enemy is the master. Long live anarchy!” Yet Bonnot just wanted to get his hands on that upper-class loot.