Madrigal

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Open Road Media, Jun 5, 2012 - Fiction - 282 pages
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.
 

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Contents

Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Section 9
Section 10
Section 11
Section 12
Section 13
Section 14
Section 15
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

DIVJ. 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./divDIV /divDIVIn 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. /div

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