France Crime

Antoine Verlaque, examining magistrate for the beautiful town of Aix-en-Provence, doesn't like Christmas. The decorations appear in the shops far too early, festive tourists swarm the streets, and his beloved Cours Mirabeau is lined with chalets selling what he regards as tacky trinkets. But his wife and partner Marine Bonnet is determined to make this a Christmas they can both enjoy, beginning with the carol sing at the Cathedral Saint Sauveur, a beautiful service in a packed church. Just as the holiday cheer is in full swing, a man is poisoned, sending the community into a tailspin.

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate 16th-century villagers.

The tulip craze of 17th century Holland has a dark side! Cornelius van Baerle, a wealthy but naive tulip grower, finds himself entangled in the deadly politics of his time, and he must decide where his true love lies.

Appointed to conquer the "crime capital of the world", the first police chief of Paris faces an epidemic of murder in the late 1600s. Assigned by Louis XIV, Nicolas de La Reynie begins by clearing the streets of filth and installing lanterns throughout Paris, turning it into the City of Light. The fearless La Reynie pursues criminals through the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the city. He unearths a tightly knit cabal of poisoners, witches, and renegade priests.

Im Jahr 1861 drang die Polizei eines französischen Dorfes in das Haus von Martin Dumollard im Wald ein. In seinem Innern herrschte das Chaos, in dem man sich Wege durch Berge von blutverschmierten Kleidungsstücken, die an manchen Stellen bis zur Decke reichten, bahnen musste. Die Beamten gingen davon aus, dass der mysteriöse Dienstmädchenräuber eine Frau getötet hatte, bei seinen anderen Versuchen jedoch gescheitert war. Doch nun wurde immer deutlicher, dass zwischen den Verbrechen, von denen sie wussten, und denen, die wirklich begangen wurden, eine enorme Kluft bestand.

Coming out of retirement can be deadly… After tragedy struck three years earlier, art sleuth Carmen De Luca vowed to never work in the field again. But fifty is too young to fill her days with water aerobics and bingo, so when her former partner calls and begs for her help, Carmen gladly agrees. Yet after their first assignment – the recovery of a rare medieval prayer book from an eccentric collector living in rural France – goes horribly wrong, Carmen ends up in the crosshairs of both the local police and a murderer! With her target dead and the stolen book missing, she and her ...

A murder mystery book set in France and England during the late 19th century. In the enthralling pages of "Murder of a Servant Girl," follow the gripping tale of Harlow and his fortuitous meeting with Baron Le Sage in Paris, which ultimately sets the stage for a complex and riveting murder investigation. While awaiting the arrival of his friend Hugo Buford in Paris, Harlow is inadvertently drawn into a labyrinthine murder mystery when he encounters Baron Le Sage. A series of seemingly coincidental events—including a peculiar accident involving a hat-sketcher named Jean Ridgway—propels ...

Capitaine Roger Blanc, an investigator with the anticorruption unit of the French Gendarmerie, was a bit too successful in his investigations. He finds himself removed from Paris to the South of France, far away from political power. Or so it would seem. The stress is too much for his marriage, and he attempts to manage the breakup while trying to settle into his new life in Provence in a 200-year-old half-ruined house. At the same time, Blanc is tasked with his first murder case.

Spring, 1918. The Great War is at a crucial stage, the Germans are making one last push into France, and the Allies are struggling to hold them back. Battle lines are shifting, and men, and their machines, are being sent up and down the front to shore up defenses. Major Heathcliff Lennox, and his batman Greggs, are told to report to their new HQ. They set off on a sunlit day to fly the distance, but the enemy is never far away, and disaster strikes. They're sent crashing to the ground behind enemy lines, where life, death, and love await.

It's not good to live in the past; even worse to die in it Paranormal investigator Wyatt Thomas awakens from a vivid dream in his French Quarter apartment. He finds an antique double-moonstone pendant placed in his hand by the ghost of a voodoo mambo. One of the two moonstones is missing, and both gemstones are needed to make the pendant magical. The rightful owner of the pendant is a supernatural fairy named Maurelle. Someone chopped off Maurelle’s wings and buried her alive in the ruins of a French Quarter Creole townhouse. A mystical beast still haunts the grounds of the estate. Now, ...

Some say vampires came to America through New Orleans. Many believe they are still there. When French Quarter private investigator Wyatt Thomas is hired by the Greater Archdiocese of New Orleans to investigate a possible satanic ceremony that may have occurred at the Old Ursuline Convent, he soon learns that more is involved than Satan, The platform where the ceremony allegedly occurred is possibly a satanic altar placed in the convent by a secret society for the specific purpose of devil worship. The Order of the Blood, an offshoot of Freemasonry, has a centuries-old secret guarded by ...

This easy French mystery includes a story in French, a complete English translation, and tons of fun exercises. Il est quatre heures 15 de l’après-midi quand j’arrive dans la rue Saint-Jacques. Je remarque tout de suite qu’il se passe quelque chose de bizarre. "Connaissez-vous monsieur Pierre-Henri de Longchamps ?" Le policier me regarde dans les yeux. Il prend son temps pour choisir ses mots. Un nœud se forme dans mon estomac. "Monsieur de Longchamps est mort, me dit-il. Et vous et votre amie madame Brown, vous êtes suspectées du crime."

A vengeful female ringleader heads an expensive show horse kidnapping operation, selling to the black market. One couple loses a much treasured dressage mount. Will Cajun Magic make it back to his rightful owners? Can the Mob push back against the villain's dark ways?

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Expats. Kate Moore is back in a pulse-pounding thriller to discover that a massive terror attack across Paris is not what it seems - and that it involves her family. On the nearby rue de Rivoli, Mahmoud Khalid climbs out of an electrician’s van and elbows his way into the crowded courtyard of the world’s largest museum. He sets down his metal briefcase, and removes his windbreaker. That’s when people start to scream.

One hot Monday morning in 1976, Albert Spaggiari engineered the European crime of the century. A bank president in Nice, France found his vault welded shut—from the inside. Spaggiari and his gang of 20 men had dug a 25-foot tunnel from the city's sewer system into the bank, where they spent a weekend cooking meals, drinking wine, and clearing millions of dollars in gold, jewelry, gems, and cash. Here is the breathtakingly compelling story of Spaggiari, his “sewer gang,” and the most daring, outrageous theft of the 20th century.

Alice, an American who loves to speak French, wants to study in Paris. She spends a week in a language school for adults. The students are friendly, and the school is located on the most beautiful avenue in Paris. At first, it's a dream! But her dream turns into a nightmare when Madame Douce, her French teacher, is found dead in the classroom.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary.

I’m Honorio, a noble cat. No brag, just fact. On vacation in a mysterious part of France with pink swamps, wild and free white horses and a wandering ghostly salt-marsh woman. My eccentric “owner,” her two devoted friends, and I, are eye-witnesses to a sudden and shocking murder! Was it murder? It was there in the room of this terribly tragic-looking, twisted, creepy mask that some archaeologists unearthed and maybe should not have. The detective in me that I was . . . that I am . . .moves into action. I detect a number of quirky people who are suspicious, if not downright fishy—...