The coast of Normandy, France, 1894: A mysterious young woman is rescued by an anonymous man after a deadly shipwreck. Paris, a few months later: The body of a well-dressed woman in a velvet mask is found in the abattoir district of La Villette in Paris. Next to the brutally strangled corpse, the drunk watchman—who witnessed the crime but was too terrified to intervene—finds a pendant featuring a black unicorn. Newly married bookseller Victor Legris is asked by an acquaintance to solve the murder of Louise Fontane, but he is initially baffled by the case. Louise was poor, so where did her finery come from? And what is the significance of the black unicorn? Within days, two more murders startle Paris—both victims were well-respected and seemingly wealthy, both have been killed in a similar fashion, both men's apartments have been defaced and ransacked, and both were members of the Black Unicorn Society, an organization bent on finding the philosopher's stone. Victor and his assistant (and brother-in-law), Jojo, struggle to draw the connections between the murders. And they struggle to keep their sleuthing from their wives, who frown upon their interest in mysteries. As their secret investigation progresses, they discover that in belle époque Paris, young girls with no money or background are as ruthlessly preyed on as ever they were. . . . Strangled in Paris is the sixth installment in Claude Izner's mystery series starring Victor Legris.

Aime Leduc, a Parisian private investigator, has sworn she would stick to tech investigation - no criminal cases for her. Especially since her father, the late police detective, was killed in the line of duty. But when an old Jewish man approaches Aime with a secret decoding job on behalf of a woman in his synagogue, Aime unwittingly takes on more than she was expecting. When she takes her findings to her client's house in the Marais, Paris's historic Jewish quarter, she finds the old woman strangled, a swastika carved on her forehead. Can Aime solve the crime?

The eleventh Aimée Leduc investigation set in Paris Business is booming for Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc. But she finds time to do a favor for her godfather, Commissaire Morbier, who asks her to drop by the gorgeous Passy home of his girlfriend, Xavierre d’Eslay, a haut bourgeois matron of Basque origin. Xavierre has been so busy with her daughter’s upcoming wedding that she has stopped taking Morbier’s calls, and he’s worried something serious is going on. When Aimée crashes the rehearsal dinner, Xavierre is discovered strangled in her own yard, and circumstantial evidence makes Morbier the prime suspect. To vindicate her godfather, Aimée must find the real killer. Her investigation leads her to police corruption, radical Basque terrorists, and a kidnapped Spanish princess.

Proceeding from an intriguing photo album documenting some 30 murders committed in Paris between 1887 and 1902, Parry investigates the ever eluding question of why people commit capital crimes. 60 duotones.

Murder on the Eiffel Tower is painstakingly researched, an effortless evocation of the glorious City of Light, and an exciting opening to a promising series featuring Victor Legris. The brand-new, shiny Eiffel Tower is the pride and glory of the 1889 World Exposition. But one sunny afternoon, as visitors are crowding the viewing platforms, 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, and appalled by the media coverage of the occurrence, 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 and he suspects an ever-changing list of possible perpetrators. Could mysterious Kenji Mori, his surrogate father and business partner at the bookstore Legris operates, be involved in the crime? Why are beautiful Russian illustrator Tasha and her colleagues at the newly launched sensationalist newspaper Passepartout always up-to-date in their reporting? And what will Legris do when the deaths begin to multiply and he is caught in a race against time? Winner of the prestigious Michel Lebrun French Thriller Prize

In In the Shadows of Paris, the fifth installment in this c'est magnifique Victor Legris series by Claude Izner, a murderer is at large in belle-epoque Paris. In the turbulent Parisian summer of 1893,Victor Legris has vowed to his fiancée to give up the dangerous hobby of amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books. But a killer is at large, leaving mysterious references to a leopard in his notes, and intent on revenge for events that took place many years before during the Commune. When a bookbinder friend of Victor's dies in a house fire that does not seem to be accidental, the young bookseller feels impelled to resume his detective work and uncover the identity of the Batignolles predator. Alongside his trusty assistant Jojo, Victor embarks on a new investigation in the bourgeois quarters of Paris, where scoundrels abound and streethawkers call out their wares among market stalls, under the bloody shadow of the Commune.

British colonists in 1830s India lived in terror of the Thugs. Reputed to be brutal criminals, the Thugs supposedly strangled, beheaded, and robbed thousands of travelers in the goddess Kali's name. The British responded with equally brutal repression of the Thugs and developed a compulsive fascination with tales of their monstrous deeds. Did the Thugs really exist, or did the British invent them as an excuse to seize tighter control of India? Drawing on historical and anthropological accounts, Indian tales and sacred texts, and detailed analyses of the secret Thug language, Martine van Woerkens reveals for the first time the real story of the Thugs. Many different groups of Thugs actually did exist over the centuries, but the monsters the British made of them had much more to do with colonial imaginings of India than with the real Thugs. Tracing these imaginings down to the present, van Woerkens reveals the ongoing roles of the Thugs in fiction and film from Frankenstein to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.