Murder Without Pity (Paperback or Softback)

Paris, France at the beginning of the second millennium: dark with fog, riots over police killings, and Far Right demagogues frightening the confused.

Such is the milieu surrounding dogged state criminal investigator Stanislas Cassel at the Palace of Justice. However, this grandson of a French propagandist for the Nazis during their Occupation, ashamed of his family's infamy, avoids anything political. Instead he buries himself tracking down perpetrators of small crimes, which he calls his Little Miseries.

One current dossier involves a pensioner's bizarre murder. During his pursuit for the killer/s, Cassel meets a beautiful Jewish woman, whose family was shipped to a death camp in 1942. Haunted by man's inhumanity, she tries to alert him to the Far Right's reemergence, but to no avail.

Only when tragedy strikes does he awake to his blindness and understand a truth: a larger evil beyond his Little Miseries as the Occupation portended, lurks.

Murder Without Pity mixes historical fact with fiction. A story about the past, the present, betrayal, murder, and redemption, it is not your everyday mystery novel.

A college graduate with a political science degree from the University of Texas, Steve Haberman pursued legal studies at UCLA before becoming a legal assistant. In his spare time, he wrote articles, then turned to writing novels.

Profitable stock market investments made travel possible, and he has since visited Europe extensively, including the battlefields of Waterloo, the Somme, and the Normandy beaches in France.

A favorite city remains the City of Light. The Paris he writes about is real, though also of the imagination. Anything can happen. Thick fog sweeps in with no warning and blinds. The metropolis becomes a nonplace of half-light and shadows. Nothing is what it appears. Is a murder more than it seems? Who can you trust? Are you sure? Such is the wilderness his criminal investigator Stanislas Cassel must wander through to solve a Murder Without Pity.

Murder Without Pity is the first in a series of crime novels set in whole or in part in Paris.

Among Steve Haberman's favorite writers are Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Philip Kerr, and Alan Furst.