French Crime Fiction

The brand-new Eiffel Tower is the glory of the 1889 Universal Exposition. But one sunny afternoon a woman collapses and dies on this great Paris landmark. Can a bee-sting really be the cause of death? Or is there a more sinister explanation?

Enter young bookseller Victor Legris. Present on the Tower at the time of the incident, he is determined to find out what actually happened.

In this dazzling evocation of late-nineteenth century Paris, we follow Victor as his investigation takes him all over the city. But what will he do when the deaths begin to multiply and he is caught in a race against time?

Bruno Courreges, chief of police of the Dordogne town of St Denis, is no stranger to murder. But when he receives a phone call from his friend, Pamela, reporting a fatal attack on her newly arrived lodger, Josette Quirit, he is forced to recuse himself from the investigation due to his close ties to the case.

Luckily, he has a project to distract him. For hundreds of years, the market of St. Denis has been the beating heart of the small town.

Now, suddenly, customers and stallholders alike have fallen away dramatically. Frustrated with his work - where a new, young detective has been brought in to replace him - Bruno throws himself into breathing new life into his beloved market. But it's not long before Bruno finds himself caught up in the investigation again when it transpires that Josette is not quite the kindly nurse she first appeared to be...

Murder isn’t always ugly. Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing.

It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her. Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem.

Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work: a riot of revenge, farce, and gleeful destruction.

Mathilde has always been a headstrong woman. A member of the French resistance when she was just eighteen years old, she both impressed and horrified everyone with her cool capacity for violence. Now it is 1985 and Mathilde is in her sixties.

She is not as glamorous as she once was, but she continues to take great pride in all that she does. Recently, however, the sixty-three-year-old has been affected by loss of memory and erratic changes in mood that even her exasperated dog Ludo has noticed. This is a potentially dangerous situation, since Mathilde now makes her living as a contract killer...

Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and ill at ease, he spends his evenings surreptitiously observing Adèle Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at his local bistro. But one day, she vanishes into thin air.

When Detective Georges Gorski begins investigating her disappearance, Manfred’s repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past. The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau effortlessly conjures up an otherworldly atmosphere that simultaneously intrigues and unsettles.

In Paul Halter’s The Fourth Door, the impossible becomes reality. A haunted room. An unbroken seal. A murder victim whose very identity is an enigma. And then, a second death in a house surrounded by untrodden snow. Both crimes defy reason—but master detective Dr. Alan Twist reveals that even the most baffling mysteries have rational explanations.

This locked-room mystery, Paul Halter's debut, won the Prix de Cognac in 1988.