Lovers at the Chameleon Club

Francine Prose, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (Harper). 

"It’s a daring thing to write about an evil person, especially in this day of autobiographical fiction, when readers assume most characters are thinly veiled self-portraits. And yet evil characters are usually dynamic and fascinating, upstaging all the goody-goodies. ...
Francine Prose is a subtle psychologist and a compassionate humanist, but nevertheless she has created a genuinely evil character in Lou Villars, a cross-dressing French racecar driver who collaborates with the Nazis and tortures résistants in the bowels of the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo. Prose is careful to show how a decent but under-loved girl becomes a monster". Edmund White, nytbooks.