For an instant the two trains ran together, going in the same direction side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth, riding in the one train, witnessed a murder in the other. Helplessly, she stared out her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat....Read more
The Dordogne town of St Denis may be picturesque and sleepy, but it has more than its fair share of mysteries, as Bruno, chef de police, knows all too well.
But when Bruno is invited to the 90th birthday of a powerful local patriarch - a war hero with high-level...Read more
Georges Simenon's haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guilt, translated by Linda Coverdale as part of the new Penguin Maigret series.
A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there...Read more
When wine tasting turns to murder.
A serial killer is on the loose in Bordeaux. A local chief detective calls wine expert Benjamin Cooker to the crime scene of a brutal murder. The killer has left a strange calling card: twelve wine glasses lined up in a semi-circle with the...Read more
When a high court judge holidaying in France with his family, finds a naked corpse in their Rolls Royce, Henri Castang is called to investigate. What transpires is mocking mayhem, as Castang weaves his way through deception and mystery and Freeling's wonderfully biting humour to unravel the...Read more
Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. As his audacious plan to uncover the truth unfolds, he encounters rich American expatriates, some truly dangerous characters, and their hidden motives.Read more
There was an exaggerated humility about her. Her cowed eyes, her way of gliding noiselessly about without bumping into things, of quivering nervously at the slightest word, were the very image of a scullery maid accustomed to hardship. And yet he sensed, beneath that image, glints of...Read more
Framed in the doorway of Poirot’s bedroom stood an uninvited guest, coated from head to foot in dust. The man’s gaunt face stared for a moment, then he swayed and fell. Who was he? Was he suffering from shock or just exhaustion? Above all, what was the significance of the figure 4,...Read more
In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, a mysterious stranger stalks the streets; an elderly woman believes her son is planning to do away with her; a prominent manufacturer drops dead. Between visits to the town’s bars, Chief Inspector Georges Gorski mulls over the connections, if...Read more
In the third Maigret mystery, the circumstances of Monsieur Gallet's death all seem fake: the name he was traveling under, his presumed profession, and, more worryingly, his family's grief. Their haughtiness seems to hide ambiguous feelings about the hapless man. Soon Maigret discovers the...Read more
France's Perigord region is the home of the exquisite black truffle, and at 5000 Euros a kilo, it's a treasured local asset. When reports come in that this unique delicacy is being adulterated with a cheaper Chinese version, Chief of Police, Captain Bruno Courreges is asked to investigate...Read more
The Frenchman returns in Dark Arena, a super-charged espionage thriller from Jack Beaumont. When an agent of the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) is brutally murdered in front of his family, the "Company" swings into action, determined to track down the killers. Meanwhile, operative Alec de Payns of the secretive Y Division is turning a Russian intelligence officer by blackmail.Read more
What was the woman doing here? Why was her body found in a stable, wearing pearl earrings, a stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes?
She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after ten in the evening. But how? And why? No one had heard a...Read more
Arty Homebrook lived and died in a world of sleaze which stretched from Chicago to Paris but never beyond the gutter. He'd been sleeping with Madame Fulton, which is why Harry Fulton promised to kill him. So far as the Paris Police are concerned it's an open and shut case. Harry's father...Read more
The enigmatic Séraphin Monge, having avenged the grisly massacre of his family, has disappeared. His brief sojourn in the village of his birth has touched the lives of its inhabitants, and he is mourned by the women who claim to have been in love with him. But is Séraphin dead or alive? Did...Read more
Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. One day, she simply vanishes...Read more
A gripping debut thriller based on the real-life experiences of a former French intelligence operative.
Alec de Payns is an operative in the secretive Y Division of the DGSE, France's famed foreign intelligence service. He's the agent at the sharp end of clandestine missions,...Read more
Paris, 1938. The last sigh of summer before the war.
As Australian journalist Charlotte 'Charlie' James alights at the Gare du Nord, ready to start her role as correspondent for The Times, Paris is in turmoil as talk of war becomes increasingly strident....Read more
The first novel in the famous Inspector Maigret series.
What Maigret sought, and what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.
Who is Pietr the Latvian? Is he a...Read more
Paris. 1930.
Salazar is an English detective haunted by his experiences of the Great War, who wiles away the days playing chess and taking on as little work as possible. When the alluring Marie Poncelet hires him to find a missing man he quickly realises it's a case he wishes he'...Read more
An immersion in French countryside and gourmet attitude with two amateur sleuths gumshoeing around Bordeaux wine country. In modern-day Bordeaux, there are few wine estates still within the city limits.Read more
At night Armand lay in bed with a sadness in his heart that ballooned until there was room for nothing else.
He thought with horror of the lying-down room...
Paris; in the stifling August heat, Commandant Serge Morel is called to a disturbing crime...Read more
In the summer of 2016, Clotilde is spending her vacation in Corsica with her husband Franck and her teenage daughter Valentine. It is the first time she has been back to the island since the car accident in which her parents and her brother were killed decades earlier. She was in the car...Read more
BEFORE
A man running along a remote clifftop path on an icy-cold February morning.
A woman standing on the cliff's edge.
A red scarf on the ground between them.
AFTER
The man is alone - paralysed by fear...Read more
Malone, a child of four, starts to claim that his mother isn't his real mother. It seems impossible. The school psychologist is the only one who believes him and he's in a race against time to find out the truth . . .Read more
Leyli Maal is a beautiful Malian woman, mother of three, living in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Marseille.
Her quiet life as a well-integrated immigrant is suddenly shaken when her beautiful eldest daughter, Bamby, becomes the main suspect in two murders linked to a...Read more
From the author of After the Crash comes a gripping new thriller about one woman’s descent into grief and madness after her ten-year-old son disappears without a trace.
Maddi Libéri is a successful doctor living an idyllic life in the South of France. On the morning of...Read more
An astonishingly brave and moving book from Caroline Darian, daughter of infamous Dominique Pelicot, detailing how her mother rebuilt her life as the world follows a trial that will go down in history.Read more
It was as if the present and the past were a spider’s web, wherein a shock to one strand could make the whole structure shake.
The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the south of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s...Read more
