Carnival

By J. Robert Janes

Amid the ruins of an abandoned Alsatian carnival, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate a pair of suspicious suicides.

During the Great War, Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr fought in Alsace on opposite sides of the barbed wire. Two decades later, they return as partners: a Gestapo officer and a French cop investigating everyday crimes in a world gone mad with war. In February 1943, Alsace is unrecognizable – an occupied country where speaking French is all it takes to lose one's freedom. St-Cyr and Kohler have been summoned to a POW camp where soldiers and the resistance manufacture textiles on the grounds of a deserted carnival. Where industry and warfare overlap, they will find a conspiracy worthy of the most twisted house of mirrors.

Two prisoners of this garish, decrepit circus have killed themselves, and the jailers must at least make a show of finding out why. Although the trenches of the Great War are long gone, St-Cyr and Kohler find that in Alsace, the fires of battle smolder still.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089528

J. Robert Janes

J. Robert Janes was born in Toronto. He holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he began writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books. In 1985 he began writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series. He is best known for his St-Cyr and Kohler series, police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France.