Treasure of Saint-Lazare

An old lover brings a cryptic letter to Paris, pulling Eddie Grant reluctantly into a treacherous web of intrigue and death - but giving him a slim chance to find the terrorists who murdered his family seven years before.

It launches him on a dangerous quest through Paris and the Loire Valley for the most valuable piece of Nazi loot that remains missing, a famous Raphael self-portrait from the early 16th century, along with the crates of Nazi bullion that accompanied it - all intended to finance the Fourth Reich.

Jen Wetzmuller, daughter of his father's World War II colleague in Army Intelligence, arrives in Paris, bearing a letter she found after her father was run down by a car on the streets of Sarasota. Its clues take Eddie from his Paris home to Florida, where he works to solve the mystery, barely escaping with his life. Then it's back home to burrow into the darkest reaches of the German occupation in search of the treasure.

Along the way he and Jen restart the brief, fiercely passionate affair that he abandoned, to his regret, 20 years before Sarasota. Most of all, Treasure of Saint-Lazare is a novel about Paris. (Treasure of Saint-Lazare is based on fact, the theft in 1939 of the priceless Raphael painting Portrait of a Young Man which disappeared in 1945.)

©2012 John M Pearce (P)2013 John M Pearce