“There were two mysteries. The first was how he went on so long lying like this, and the second was why

people did not suspect anything.” Discovering the Facts of a Man Who Lived a Monstrous Fiction — The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous

Deception reviewed:

On Jan. 9, 1993, in a small French

town, a respected doctor named

Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife and

their two children and then drove a few

miles to his parents’ home and killed them.

Tried and convicted by a French court, he

was given a life sentence.

Emmanuel Carrère, a French novelist and

screenwriter, was fascinated by the case,

not because of the murders but because Mr.

Romand was not a doctor and had invented

his entire life. It was a lie that he lived for

18 years. New York Times