Paris, December 1942. The corpse of a naked girl has been found, strangled. Not far away, the body of a young man is discovered with his throat slashed, tied to the back of a carousel animal. A Wehrmacht corporal is killed. Scattered ancient Roman coins connect the three victims. Is it the Resistance? Or are sex and greed, the oldest of motivations, still rampant in a country groaning under the burden of Occupation?
J. Robert Janes's mysteries have been heralded as "an astonishing historical series" in The New York Times Book Review.
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.