You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A hijacked delivery vehicle draws St-Cyr and Kohler back to the killing fields of World War I The last time Jean-Louis St-Cyr visited the ruins of this ancient abbey, during one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Great War, a sniper nearly killed him. Three decades later, death has brought him here again. Ever since the German occupation of France, the chief inspector has worked alongside German detective inspector Hermann Kohler, solving crimes too common to pique the Gestapo’s interest. Now, during the fall of 1943, the war is going badly for the Third Reich, but conflicts continue to plague these two unlikely allies. A bank-owned cargo van is parked near the crumbling monastery, its contents ransacked, its passengers murdered. The killers took small bills but left behind a bounty in smuggled champagne, cheese, and coffee. Even more confounding is the expensive pair of high heels left behind. Were the thieves from the Resistance, or from the underworld? Who is the mysterious woman who was wearing those shoes? St-Cyr and Kohler have a feeling that the answers are hiding in the cold French rain.
A French inspector and Gestapo detective team up to fight crime in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II: “The offbeat pair gel . . . fast and convincing” (The Oxford Times). Police inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr watches the German tanks roll into Paris from his office window. When Gestapo agents burst through his door, he is destroying confidential documents with the care that is his trademark. As the Nazis take control of the city, they allow St-Cyr to remain at his post, solving the everyday crimes which do not stop simply because there is a war on. He is assigned a partner, Bavarian detective Hermann Kohler, a bullish man who is as brutal as St-Cyr is refined. Though their politics differ, neither man is the sort to let a bad deed go unpunished. Today their work takes them to a suburban forest, where a well-dressed young man has been found murdered and stripped of identification. Nearby lies an expensive beaded silk purse. Although it appears to be a crime of passion, its roots lie in the savagery that wartime nurtures and occupation lets run free.
Caught between empires, a young woman risks her life for Ireland Mary Ellen Fraser speeds down the lonely country road, aware that no matter how fast she drives, she cannot outrun the secret in her heart. In the POW camps of Northern Ireland, this doctor’s wife found a lover—a handsome German officer who begged her to smuggle a letter to his cousin. But the cousin is a lie, and the note is really an encoded message for Admiral Dönitz, high commander of the Nazi fleet. Not only has Mary betrayed her husband, she has betrayed Britain, as well. When she discovers the consequences of her unwitting bit of espionage, Mary does everything she can to undo the damage. Trapped between Britain, Germany, and the merciless Irish Republican Army, Mary is the only person who can keep the Nazis from landing in Ireland.
DIVA series of interlocking crimes send St-Cyr and Kohler into the heart of the Parisian underworld It is February 1943, and Paris is under a blackout. For three years, the French inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo have investigated the mundane violence of Nazi-occupied France, but never have they experienced such a cold, sleeting winter. While investigating a burgled stamp collector’s shop, they get a call telling them that they went to the wrong crime scene—they were supposed to have been sent to comfort a woman who was attacked for running around with Nazis and their collaborators. The rapist’s timing was perfect—so perfect that the two detectives wonder if they were deliberately sent to the wrong place. They next follow up on a tip about a body dumped in a cellar. The young man they find has been stripped naked, savagely murdered, and left to rot. Was he a homosexual? A pimp? A Resistance fighter? Theft, murder, rape—conspiracy. It is just another night in Paris under the Nazis./div
DIVA kept woman’s murder leads detectives St-Cyr and Kohler to the upper crust of occupied Paris/divDIV/divDIVIt is December 1942, and the Parisian Gestapo agents pass their days by executing dissidents and plotting the destruction of the Resistance. Homicide detectives Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler, meanwhile, must make do solving the gritty crimes with which the Nazi elite do not bother. Just hours after they learn that St-Cyr’s wife and child have died, the partners confront an ugly murder that turns out to be very glamorous indeed./divDIV /divDIVIn a pay-by-the-hour hotel, a young woman is found surrounded by counterfeit coins and an ocean of blood. Her ID says she is an art s...
In Nazi-occupied France, a French-German detective team must solve a murder in Avignon’s Papal Palace—“Plenty of atmosphere and a great setting” (The Globe and Mail). Six hundred years before the Germans conquered Paris, the pope came to Avignon to rule the Roman Church from afar. In January 1943, Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler visit the former Papal Palace—not as tourists, but as detectives. Where once the pope spoke to God, a woman has had her throat cut. Her corpse seems to have appeared from out of the past. Despite the strictures of wartime rationing, she died in finery, costumed in the ermine and silk of a Renaissance courtier. She appears to have been killed with a scythe, pulled across her neck in one swift stroke, like a shepherd slaughtering a sheep. Wartime Avignon is a small city, steeped in the jealousy that occupation encourages. As St-Cyr and Kohler dig into the city’s past, they find motives for murder that predate the Nazis by centuries.
DIVIn Provence, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate an old-fashioned murder/divDIV/divDIVThe train ride from Paris is supposed to take four hours, but a Resistance bomb has snarled the tracks, and detectives Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler are fourteen hours behind schedule. By the time they arrive in Provence, they are travel-weary but intrigued. Even in wartime, it’s rare to investigate a murder by crossbow./divDIV /divDIVThe woman was in her early fifties, with well-made clothing and opal earrings that indicate that, until war came, she was wealthy. The crossbow bolt was barbed, and as she tried to pull it out, it shredded her heart. St-Cyr and Kohler quickly learn why the villagers are loath to cooperate: The woman was a smuggler, killed to protect the black market that the inhabitants of this frigid, war-wracked countryside cannot survive without./div
From a master of World War II espionage, a thrilling tale of an adoptive mother and a lost boy fighting to survive in occupied France The moment Angélique arrives in Paris, she is taken prisoner by the SS. In a lonely little room, she is put in a chair with leather straps and a bloodstained seat and ordered to tell her captors everything she knows about the resistance. But Angélique knows nothing. She cares only for poor Martin, the boy who has been unable to speak since the bombs first fell during the Blitzkrieg. He has a secret—and she will protect it until her dying breath. Though Angélique loves him like her own, Martin is not her son. He came to her from the sky, brought by a parachute dropped by the British, and if the Germans learn his true identity, it will mean certain death for both of them. The Little Parachute is a testament to the genius of J. Robert Janes, author of the legendary St.-Cyr and Kohler mysteries, who understands the tragedies of World War II like no one else.
DIVIn the dead of winter, a serial killer targets the children of Paris/divDIV/divDIVIt is January 1943, and as Germany reels from the defeat at Stalingrad, Hermann Kohler learns that his sons were among the German casualties. He has no choice but to set grief aside and continue working, solving everyday cases in and around Paris. Today he and his partner, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, examine the corpse of a murdered girl. As St-Cyr examines the crime scene, Kohler is overwhelmed; after seeing countless corpses, he can no longer stand it./divDIV /divDIVThis slender schoolgirl is the fifth victim of the serial killer named Sandman. Like the others, she was stabbed to death with a knitting needle and left in plain sight—in this case, in a birdcage in the Bois de Boulogne. Kohler can do nothing for this girl or for his own sons, but for the sake of France’s children, he will send Sandman to the guillotine./div
Set in Nazi-occupied France, this is an “enthralling, character-propelled” police procedural (Kirkus Reviews). Before the war, the hotels of Vittel hosted the wealthiest members of French society. Now, in the winter of 1943, two of France’s most luxurious resorts have been converted into an internment camp for British and American women who failed to escape the country when the German army stormed across the border. For two years, the prisoners have lived quietly, surviving on Red Cross aid packages, but now they are beginning to die. An American woman is found stabbed through the heart with a pitchfork. By the time inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler arrive from Paris, rigor mortis and the February frost have frozen her solid. In her pockets are Cracker Jacks and Hershey bars—bribes intended for one of the guards. To bring justice to Vittel, St-Cyr and Kohler will have to unravel the conspiracy that is at the heart of this luxurious, elegant hell.