"Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is summoned to France after receiving a distressing letter with a urgent cry for help. Upon his arrival in Merlinville-sur-Mer, the investigator finds the man who penned the letter, the South American millionaire Monsieur Renauld, stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining the property. Meanwhile the millionaire's wife is found bound and gagged in her room. Apparently,...

Commissaire Adamsberg investigates the death of three men linked by their childhood at an orphanage in Nimes, all killed by the venom of the recluse spider, in the new novel by the #1 bestselling French crime writer.

"Fin Tighe is clinging to respectability by his nail-bitten fingers. He may be the illegitimate son of an English earl, but he hasn't spoken to his father in a decade, and his engineer's salary is barely enough to support him and his cousin Aurelie. A dancer in the corps de ballet, Aurelie is at constant risk from groping, leering men who assume any dancer is a prostitute in training. And Fin's evenings spent in the clandestine gay community may be...

This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. Beautiful like a fairy tale, frozen in time, this novel has a hypnotic quality.

"After amateur detective Molly Sutton stumbles on a dead body, she wastes no time before eavesdropping and elbowing her way into conversations all over the French village of Castillac. But when Chief Dufort is about to clap handcuffs on the wrong man, she's got to do more than chat to save him."--Provided by publisher.