A kept woman’s murder leads detectives St-Cyr and Kohler to the upper crust of occupied ParisIt 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. In 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 student, but the quality of her clothes tell St-Cyr that she must be the mistress of a very rich man. The girl’s killer is powerful, and guilty of much worse than murder.“The unorthodox detective partners in a haunting wartime series by J. Robert Janes make compassion their business. St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo work the mundane murder cases no one else wants to be bothered with. They cry for us all.” —The New York Times Book Review “Keeps the suspense burning slowly but with mounting power—their most successful outing yet.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Janes] captures the seamy side of Paris, its ambience and its people, most trying to survive but some trying to get rich.” —The Sunday OklahomanJ. 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.
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.
Amid the ruins of an abandoned Alsatian carnival, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate a pair of suspicious suicides During the Great War, Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr fought in Alsace on opposite sides of the barbed wire. Two decades later, they return as partners: a Gestapo officer and a French cop investigating everyday crimes in a world gone mad with war. In February 1943, Alsace is unrecognizable—an occupied country where speaking French is all it takes to lose one’s freedom. St-Cyr and Kohler have been summoned to a POW camp where soldiers and résistants manufacture textiles on the grounds of a deserted carnival. Where industry and warfare overlap, they will find a conspiracy worthy of the most twisted house of mirrors. Two prisoners of this garish, decrepit circus have killed themselves, and the jailers must at least make a show of finding out why. Although the trenches of the Great War are long gone, St-Cyr and Kohler find that in Alsace, the fires of battle smolder still.
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
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.
DIVIn the wake of World War II, a Frenchwoman learns to live for vengeance/divDIV In Zurich, a frail young woman sits down in a café. On her arm is a tattooed number—a souvenir from her time in Bergen-Belsen. As far as the French government is concerned, she is a dead woman, a casualty of the concentration camps. But after a narrow escape, Lily de St-Germain is back, and ready to take revenge on everyone who buried her./divDIV /divDIVWhen the war started, Lily fled the countryside for Paris, hoping to convince her husband to abandon his work at the Louvre and help get their children to safety in England. There she found him in the arms of her sister, a betrayal that pushed her into the ranks of the Résistance—that fearful band of partisans who taught her to kill, and forced her to survive. The war may end in 1945, but Lily’s battle will have only just begun./div
A schoolteacher enters a war of shadows to save his daughter from the 3rd Reich David Ashby spent the last war killing Germans, and the years after falling in love with one. By the time Hitler comes to power, David has a half-German daughter, Karen, whom he loves more than life itself. So when Europe begins to slide toward war, and it becomes unsafe for an American to stay in the Fatherland, David does the only thing he can: He flees—and takes his daughter with him. David takes refuge in England, becoming a teaching master at a quiet country boarding school, and places Karen with friends on the Cornwall coast. But Hitler will not part with a daughter of the 3rd Reich so easily. German intelligence sends a sleeper, a dormant agent awakened, to finish off David and recover his child, drawing the mild-mannered schoolteacher—and the British intelligence services—into the thick of a secret war. Caught between 2 armies of spies, David will do whatever it takes to preserve Karen’s freedom.
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.
DIVA young girl vanishes, leaving nothing behind but a pile of nude photos/divDIV/divDIVSince the Germans occupied Paris, police inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr has not been able to work a murder, robbery, or arson case without his German overlords demanding he work faster. His partner, Bavarian detective Hermann Kohler, does not share the sadism of many of his Gestapo colleagues, but he, too, has an obsession with speed. Their latest case calls for a sprint. For if they don’t work quickly, a girl will die./divDIV /divDIVJoanne was a neighbor of St-Cyr’s who answered a modeling ad and never came home. By the time St-Cyr and Kohler break down the door of the supposed agency, all that remains are snapshots of Joanne and others posing naked at gunpoint. Complicating their search is a massive bank robbery perpetrated the day Joanne disappeared. If they can find the connection between the two crimes, the girl will be safe—or at least as safe as a Parisian can be in the winter of 1942./div
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
“Gritty . . . captivating . . . An exceedingly clever novel that should appeal to World War II buffs as well as mystery readers” (Booklist). In a packed movie theater, an usher notices two women enter and leave just before the show begins. Moments later, the theater goes up in flames, and 183 people perish in the stampede to escape. By the time investigators Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler arrive from Paris, the charred bodies are frozen solid. It is two days before Christmas, 1942, and the people of Lyon are terrified. As the detectives try to unravel what happened in that packed movie house, the arsonists plan their next attack. Saving Lyon from fire will force St-Cyr and Kohler to confront the worst of human nature, in a city lorded over by one of the most infamous Nazis of the Second World War.
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
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