A fashionable French painter is found strangled, a crime highly embarrassing for the Establishment as his wife, a lady of dubious morals, was in the news a year earlier when the President of France happened to die in her bed. And the last thing the authorities want is to revive the whole outrage. But Inspector Gautier is not a man to deflect the course of justice. Defying his chief, he uncovers some shocking scandals, one of them concerning no less than the Russian Ambassador, and his investigations culminate in an extravagant finale in Maxim's in its Belle Epoque heyday.

A painter has vanished: normally an event of no importance, but Théo is the heir to a fortune, and so Inspector Gautier of the Sûreté is put on the case. Then a shady art dealer is murdered. A dealer who had acquired three paintings under dubious circumstances, from a minor artist who died in similarly dubious circumstances. But why is it that so many people want to gain possession of the paintings now - a princess, a Greek millionaire and even, in a roundabout way, Théo?

With the Entente Cordiale still in its infancy, the Sûreté had assigned Inspector Gautier to keep a protective eye on English visitors to Paris for the racing at Longchamps. But it was not the English who engaged Gautier's attention, but an Irish surgeon - Michael Breen. Breen, fêted by the ladies of Paris, is accused of a trivial assault - and almost at once Princess Hélène's daughter goes missing and a shop assistant at Au Bon Marché is found dead just as Breen flees the country. Inspector Gautier is hot on his heels to Dublin, whilst a third murder back in Paris complicates the affair for all involved.

When a homemade bomb explodes on a houseboat moored on the Seine, following two brutal stabbings in Pigalle, the Paris police receive a list of targets for assassination that includes the President of the Republic himself. Each murder will be announced beforehand by the arrival of a playing card. Inspector Jean-Paul Gautier believes the choice of cards, their suit and value, are significant in some way, and must follow the threads of a riddle that unfolds against the colourful backdrop of life in Belle Époque Paris and climaxes in a spectacular bal masqué.

When the valet of a German baron visiting Paris is stabbed to death, the murder is not allowed to interfere with the glittering social life of the Belle Epoque. Inspector Gautier has scarcely begun to investigate the murder when he is instructed to make secret enquiries into a case of espionage involving the Minister for War. The minister has been wildly indiscreet, and Gautier's enquiries uncover a murderous conspiracy, which is brought to a denouement during a spectacular historical pageant under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

When journalist Ronnie Bart visits a Rome clinic, where one of his colleagues lies drugged, he becomes involved in a series of adventures in which fear and death are never far away. In a Copenhagen nightclub, Bart meets a young millionaire, Paul Arved, and goes with him and his 'flying circus' of girls and hangers-on in a private jet to the South of France. They then proceed to Sicily, where the story reaches a dramatic, violent finale.