Adapted for television in France, the first of the Nicolas Le Floch mysteries tells the story of murder against the backdrop of the glittering court of Louis XV. 'Has all the twists, turns and surprises the genre demands' Independent on Sunday It's France, 1761. Beyond the glittering court of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour at Versailles, lies Paris, a capital in the grip of crime and immorality ... A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young recruit to the force, is instructed to find him. When unidentified human remains suddenly come to light, he seems to have a murder investigation on his hands. As the city descends into Carnival debauchery, Le Floch will need all his skill, courage and integrity to unravel a mystery which threatens to implicate the highest in the land. This is the first in a series of six historical crime novels which has sold in excess of 400,000 copies in French. The author brings eighteenth-century Paris vividly to life and the story features real-life characters Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV as well as engaging hero Nicolas le Floch.

Paris, February 1761. A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young Breton police recruit is instructed to find him ...

2nd Nicolas Le Floch investigation - a sinister death at the opera reveals something rotten at the French court.

The troubled head of the Detective Branch returns, in an intriguing case of kidnap, rebellion and murder... The body of a vagrant is discovered in a ditch in County Tipperary. Knox, a young Irish policeman with divided loyalties is told that the landowner wants the case dealt with swiftly and quietly. However, when Knox examines the corpse, he realises that this supposed vagrant was wearing a Savile Row suit . . . Three months earlier, Detective Inspector Pyke was investigating a kidnapping in Wales. The crime seems to be linked to a group of rebels, but Pyke soon suspects the case is not as clear cut as it seems. What are the links between the rebellion in Wales and the unrest in Ireland - and has Pyke finally bitten off more than he can chew?

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

This riveting biography brilliantly explores the short, intense, and passionate life of the country girl from Normandy, who at thirteen fled her brute of a father to go to Paris. Almost overnight she became one of the most admired courtesans of the 1840s—the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camellias and Verdi’s La Traviata. With her aristocratic ways, elegant clothes and signature camellias, Marie was always a subject of fascination at the opera and the boulevard cafés. Her death at twenty-three from tuberculosis created such an outpouring of sympathy in the press that Charles Dickens, who was in Paris at the time, was amazed. “Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important,” he wrote, “the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.”