Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. Accompanying him are Estalere, a young Sargeant, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is a welcome change of scenery, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the...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
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
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
A woman’s body is pulled from the frozen Danube in Bratislava. Police Commander Jana Matinova recognizes the killer’s calling card. She had him in her grasp once before …and he slipped away. But not this time. Determined to end the bloody killing spree, Matinova’s investigation plunges her...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
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
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
When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. On the site of the French capital's former slaughterhouses, the blood is just starting to flow, and...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
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
In Banon, a small, peaceful village in upper Provençe, the local community's principal source of income is the cultivation and sale of truffles. Tourists rarely venture into this remote region, but a small group of outsiders have chosen to set up home on the outskirts of the village....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
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
Early one morning in Paris the magnificent tranquillity of the Sorbonne university is shattered by a death. But why would Albert Cadas, a crumpled professor of medieval literature, have any reason to kill himself? Meanwhile, Valentine Savi, a talented young restorer, receives a visit from...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
Pierre Niemans and Karim Abdouf, two highly uncoventional policmen, join forces to solve murders in the French Alps.Read more
The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines.
When another of D'Aulnay-...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
There's no rest for Paris's top criminal investigation division, La Crim'. Who is preying on women in the French capital? How can he kill again and again without leaving any clues? A serial killer is taking pleasure in a macabre ritual that leaves the police on tenterhooks. Chief of Police...Read more
The first installment in a wonderful new series that follows the exploits of Benoît Courrèges, a policeman in a small French village where the rituals of the café still rule. Bruno -- as he is affectionately nicknamed -- may be the town's only municipal policeman, but in the hearts and...Read more
Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc (11 November 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and short story writer, his best known of detective fiction “Arsene Lupin” series. The Works of Maurice Leblanc (with an active table of contents) contains 16 books, including:
“The Arsene Lupin...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
A collaboration between William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and Octopus Books to create a series of omnibus editions of certain authors which would be available at low prices. The works of Simenon, and especially with an emphasis on the Maigret stories, were an obvious choice for...Read more
As a child, Ali Neuman narrowly escaped being murdered by Inkatha, a militant political party at war with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. His father and brother were not so lucky. Only he and his mother survived the carnage of those years. But as with many survivors, the...Read more
Every Saturday evening, travelling salesman Fernand Ravinel returns to his wife, Mireille, who waits patiently for him at home. But Ferdinand has another lover, Lucienne, an ambitious doctor, and together the adulterers have devised a murderous plan.
Drugging Mireille, the pair...Read more
Antoine, a fanatic billiards player, is asked to watch over a Paris art gallery. When he scuffles with a thief a statue falls and severs his right hand. His maverick investigation leads to the discovery of a series of gruesome killings. Soon Antoine finds himself the prime suspect in the...Read more
The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation published to coincide with a major new biography of the real-life “Lady of the Camellias”
One of the greatest love stories of...Read more
Every year the storks set off on their miraculous 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to Central Africa. Then one year, inexplicably, they do not return.
At the invitation of the wealthy Swiss ornithologist Max Boehm, a young French academic, Louis Antioch, agrees to...Read more
On the night of 22 December 1980, a plane crashes on the Franco-Swiss border and is engulfed in flames. 168 out of 169 passengers are killed instantly. The miraculous sole survivor is a three-month-old baby girl. Two families, one rich, the other poor, step forward to claim her, sparking an...Read more