A senator. A banker. A brilliant architect. All dead at Paris landmarks, all arranged with the same cold precision. Europol investigator Lucas Faro has seen meticulous killings before. He's never seen one that looked like an argument.
When Senator Henri Beaumont is found posed on the Pont Alexandre III at dawn — chair facing the Eiffel Tower, hands in lap, pocket square folded with someone else's eye — the Brigade Criminelle calls it murder. Lucas Faro, attached in a liaison capacity he has no intention of respecting, calls it a communication.
The theatre programme on the second body confirms it. Les Absents, opening night, October 2003. The same night five directors of a development company called Lumière Consortium SA were all in the same room.
Twenty years ago, Lumière built two hundred and forty homes on a contaminated site in the 18th arrondissement. The soil surveys were falsified. The families moved in. Four children died of rare cancers. The legal complaint that followed was closed in eleven weeks.
The killer has already built the case. Now they're forcing someone to listen.
Faro works the investigation the only way he knows how — from motive backward — while the body count climbs toward a fifth name that someone has gone to great lengths to erase from every official record. As the killer draws closer to their final target, Faro closes in on someone he didn't expect: a person whose grief is entirely rational, whose evidence is impeccable, and whose methods he cannot justify and cannot entirely condemn.
Fans of Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and Henning Mankell will recognise the moral seriousness. Fans of James Patterson will recognise the pace.
The Paris Murders is Book 1 of the Faro Files, a pan-European crime series following Europol investigator Lucas Faro across the continent's great cities. Each book stands alone. Each leaves a city changed.
Genre: Mystery
When Senator Henri Beaumont is found posed on the Pont Alexandre III at dawn — chair facing the Eiffel Tower, hands in lap, pocket square folded with someone else's eye — the Brigade Criminelle calls it murder. Lucas Faro, attached in a liaison capacity he has no intention of respecting, calls it a communication.
The theatre programme on the second body confirms it. Les Absents, opening night, October 2003. The same night five directors of a development company called Lumière Consortium SA were all in the same room.
Twenty years ago, Lumière built two hundred and forty homes on a contaminated site in the 18th arrondissement. The soil surveys were falsified. The families moved in. Four children died of rare cancers. The legal complaint that followed was closed in eleven weeks.
The killer has already built the case. Now they're forcing someone to listen.
Faro works the investigation the only way he knows how — from motive backward — while the body count climbs toward a fifth name that someone has gone to great lengths to erase from every official record. As the killer draws closer to their final target, Faro closes in on someone he didn't expect: a person whose grief is entirely rational, whose evidence is impeccable, and whose methods he cannot justify and cannot entirely condemn.
Fans of Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and Henning Mankell will recognise the moral seriousness. Fans of James Patterson will recognise the pace.
The Paris Murders is Book 1 of the Faro Files, a pan-European crime series following Europol investigator Lucas Faro across the continent's great cities. Each book stands alone. Each leaves a city changed.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Daniel Parton's The Paris Murders