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Summary
"Murder on a bitter winter's night in 1942 on a deserted road of France's Fontainebleau Forest - a young man with empty pockets and no I.D. Nearby, frozen blood on the rock that killed him, the print of a woman's shoe and a beaded silk purse containing a million francs in uncut diamonds. A crime of passion? The work of the Resistance? Or something else altogether?" "Enter a most unlikely pair - Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Surete Nationale, and Hermann Kohler, a maverick member of the Gestapo, not one to follow orders blindly. Higher-ups in the German command order St-Cyr to solve the crime in two days, and Kohler to keep an eye on him. The two seeming opposites, facing bureaucratic pressure, both German and French, develop a grudging respect for each other, then overcome all odds to become friends and partners." "Set in the nightclubs and couture houses that remain in a society ravaged by German occupation, Mirage - the first novel in a projected series featuring St-Cyr and Kohler - is a riveting combination of deduction and psychological thriller that climaxes with a hair-raising denouement in a chateau on the Loire River."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Janes's ( The Hiding Place ) engrossing solidly commercial whodunit, the first in a planned series, pairs a Gestapo agent and a Surete detective ordered to investigate a murder in the occupied France of 1942. When a young man is killed in Fontainebleau Forestsic , the gruff but not inhuman Hermann Kohler dismisses the crime as Resistance retribution. But Jean-Louis St-Cyrsic doubts that the victim, found without ID, was a collaborator. And he discovers an unusual clue: a silk-and-pearl purse stuffed with diamonds. As St-Cyr searches for its owner, Kohler is pressured to drop the case--he's threatened with reassignment to the Russian front--and St-Cyr's wife leaves him for a strapping storm trooper. But St-Cyr has more pressing problems than marital infidelity. For starters, the Resistance is blaming him for the murder. Then a second murder stops the sleuths in their tracks. Enter a countess and a general in the Waffen SS who is desperate to wrap up the case. Although utterances such as ``Gott in Himmel'' and ``Ah, mon Dieu'' must serve as atmosphere, the characters' complex relationships--Kohler and St-Cyr's; St-Cyr and his wife's; Frenchmen and their new masters'--make for a fast-moving and absorbing story. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Occupied France, 1942. The apparently accidental death of a pointedly anonymous young man in Fontainebleau Forest brings together an improbable pair of investigators: Gestapo Officer Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté. Under threats of reassignment and deportation by blustering Gestapo General Ackermann, the pair uses a handful of clues--a beaded purse found near the body, a single woman's footprint in the snow--to trace the victim's ties to the fashionable nightclub Mirage, and, through fabled chanteuse Gabrielle Arcuri, to the landed, troubled Thériault family and the not-so-holy Abbey of St. Gregory. As if sex, money, and religion weren't enough, Kohler and St- Cyr are menaced at every turn by both the Gestapo and the Resistance- -and by revelations that lead straight to Ackermann himself. Everything but the kitchen sink, with enough climaxes to satisfy Shere Hite. It's hard to imagine what Janes (The Alice Factor, etc.) is leaving over for the projected series starring Kohler and St-Cyr.