Salamander - Softcover

Janes, J. Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569471576 ISBN 13: 9781569471579

Publisher: Soho Crime, 2003

Synopsis

Detectives Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler investigate a series of arson fires and murders in World War II's occupied France

About this title

About the Author

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he started writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series.

In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The thirteenth in the series, Bellringer, was published in 2012. 

From Publishers Weekly

Sandman, the previous title in Canadian author Janes's series about an unlikely team of detectives in Occupied France, was chosen by both PW and the New York Times as one of the best mysteries of 1997. This new titleAonly the fourth to appear here but actually written in 1994 and one of nine books in the series already published in EnglandAis equally compelling. Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French S?ret? and Inspector Hermann Kohler, attached to the Gestapo in Paris, arrive in Lyon on the day before Christmas, 1942. They are investigating an arson fire in a movie house that has killed 183 peopleAmany of them railway workers gathered to watch Jean Renoir's La B?te humaine. "They were a pair, these two detectives," a Nazi officer observes. "St-Cyr was a patriot and therefore untrustworthy; Kohler a doubter of Germanic invincibility. They'd been in trouble with the SS far too many times." And indeed, the two cops quickly raise the hackles of Lyon's top NazisAincluding ambitious Obersturmf?hrer Klaus BarbieAas they search for an arsonist known as Salamander who has struck at least three times previously. As in previous books in the series, sexAtwisted and perverted by the timesAplays a large part in the investigation. One example of Janes's artistry: in a city starved for food, he spends three richly ironic pages describing the remains of a Christmas Eve feast in an exclusive bordello without slowing down the action or lessening the power of his terrible vision of a world full of large and small crimes.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Crime
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1569471576
• ISBN 13: 9781569471579
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272