French Classic Mysteries

“There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only…A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the...

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of...

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the fourth Inspector French novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’. THE BODY THAT CAME FROM NOWHERE Off the coast of Burry Port in south Wales, two fishermen discover a shipping crate and manage to haul it ashore...

A twisty, binge-y novel of art, sex, fashion, and murder, a delicious game of cat and mouse across the arrondissements of Paris, where every form of beauty is for sale Nothing is more interesting than a person with something to hide. "Thrilling, deliciously sordid, full of beauty and heartbreak...

Marseille, 1845. When Blanche de Cazalis, ward of one of the city's most powerful men, falls in love with Philippe Cayol, a young man with neither fortune nor family name, she sets in motion a chain of events that will consume two families and nearly bring down a city. Her uncle, Monsieur de Cazalis, will not forgive the insult to his name — or risk his hold on his niece's fortune. He turns the full weight of his influence against Philippe, dragging him before a courtroom on a trumped-up charge, while Philippe's devoted brother Marius and a fierce young flower-seller named Fine fight in ...

Paris, 1827. Beneath the polished surface of the Restoration — the balls, the salons, the careful restoration of royal dignity — another city hums with dangerous life. Secret societies operate behind respectable facades. Political conspiracies wind through the back streets. Men and women who have survived revolution, empire, and counter-revolution now live by whatever means they can, bound by loyalties that no government has ever sanctioned. Into this world steps M. Jackal, inspector of police — patient, brilliant, and possessed of a seemingly supernatural ability to know what the ...

Coming out of retirement can be deadly… After tragedy struck three years earlier, art sleuth Carmen De Luca vowed to never work in the field again. But fifty is too young to fill her days with water aerobics and bingo, so when her former partner calls and begs for her help, Carmen gladly agrees. Yet after their first assignment – the recovery of a rare medieval prayer book from an eccentric collector living in rural France – goes horribly wrong, Carmen ends up in the crosshairs of both the local police and a murderer! With her target dead and the stolen book missing, she and her ...

Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety...

Alexandre Dumas, the legendary author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, is best known for his swashbuckling adventures and historical epics. However, The Mohicans of Paris (Les Mohicans de Paris), first published in serialized form between 1854 and 1855, showcases a different yet equally thrilling side of his storytelling. Blending crime, mystery, and social intrigue, this sprawling novel takes readers into the dark underbelly of 19th-century Paris, where secret societies, ruthless criminals, and relentless detectives collide in a world of danger and deception. The ...

Paris, 1827. Beneath the polished surface of the Restoration — the balls, the salons, the careful restoration of royal dignity — another city hums with dangerous life. Secret societies operate behind respectable facades. Political conspiracies wind through the back streets. Men and women who have survived revolution, empire, and counter-revolution now live by whatever means they can, bound by loyalties that no government has ever sanctioned. Into this world steps M. Jackal, inspector of police — patient, brilliant, and possessed of a seemingly supernatural ability to know what the ...

Oscar Husson boards a coach from Paris to the Ile-Adam and does what young men of bourgeois aspiration have always done in such situations: he makes claims about himself that the subsequent years will spend considerable energy disproving. The boasts he offers his fellow passengers on that journey will follow him — through military service, through the various humiliations of a life conducted at the distance between pretension and reality — until the world has taught him, at the rate it always sets, the difference between the person he claimed to be and the person he was capable of ...

Au XVIIIe siècle vécut en France un homme qui compta parmi les personnages les plus généreux et les plus horribles de son époque. Il s'appelait Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Sa naissance, son enfance furent épouvantables et tout autre que lui n'aurait pas survécu. Mais, Grenouille n'avait besoin que d'un minimum de nourriture et de vêtements, et son âme n'avait besoin de rien.

Alexandre Dumas, the legendary author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, is best known for his swashbuckling adventures and historical epics. However, The Mohicans of Paris (Les Mohicans de Paris), first published in serialized form between 1854 and 1855, showcases a different yet equally thrilling side of his storytelling. Blending crime, mystery, and social intrigue, this sprawling novel takes readers into the dark underbelly of 19th-century Paris, where secret societies, ruthless criminals, and relentless detectives collide in a world of danger and deception. The ...

Three women. Three different encounters with the same social world — its marriages, its codes of honor, its promises and its costs. Julie d'Aiglemont marries at nineteen, in the full romantic ardor of the Napoleonic era, and spends the following decades learning with quiet precision what that decision has cost her. Madame de Merret is forced by her husband to swear, on a crucifix, that there is no one in the closet of her bedroom — and her husband, having extracted the oath, orders the closet walled up. Honorine leaves her privileged life and her devoted husband to live alone in a Paris...

A wealthy provincial spinster has been waiting for a suitable husband for longer than Alençon can remember. Two men compete for her hand: the Chevalier de Valois, old royalist, elegant, impractical, a relic of the ancien régime preserved in provincial amber; and du Bousquier, republican, bourgeois, physically unprepossessing and completely unscrupulous. Their rivalry is a contest between two Frances forced into uneasy cohabitation under the Restoration — and du Bousquier wins. The d'Esgrignon family are old Norman nobility, proud and genuinely distinguished and entirely irrelevant to ...

“You will all remain seated. Anyone who tries to get up, or even moves, will be shot. There will be no further warning. If you move you will be killed…” Four men seize a New York City subway train, and hold its passengers hostage. The identities of the hijackers are unknown. Their demands...

With some trepidation Nigel Derry approaches the country house of his enigmatic and unpredictable aunt Gwenny for an Easter holiday visit. After a tense few days in which her guests' interactions range from awkward dinners to a knife fight, a disgruntled aunt Gwenny departs for Europe. Receiving a telegram from Le Touquet inviting him to join Gwenny in the south of France, Nigel finds himself on a vacation cut short by murder as a cold shadow of suspicion eclipses the sunny beauty of the Côte d'Azur.

Just Nivières arrives at the Château d'Ionis with a legal problem and leaves with considerably more than he bargained for. The problem is this: his client, the Comtesse Félicie d'Ionis, wishes to lose her own lawsuit. Her legal position is strong; her opponents, the d'Aillane family, would be ruined by a verdict in her favor; and her conscience, which is clearer and more generous than the law generally accommodates, has led her to instruct her lawyers accordingly. Her husband, who holds legal authority over the property she brought into the marriage, disagrees. And Nivières, twenty-two ...

Paris, 1832. A curse. A conspiracy. A fortune that could change everything. Across continents and through generations, the descendants of a persecuted family converge on Paris, unknowingly bound by a mysterious inheritance—one that could lift them from poverty and oppression. But powerful forces lurk in the shadows, determined to seize the fortune for themselves. From the frozen plains of Siberia to the streets of revolutionary Paris, Eugene Sue weaves an epic tale of seven heirs drawn together by fate: an exiled aristocrat, a factory girl, a soldier, an orphan, and others whose lives ...

Pierrette Lorrain is a child, an orphan, sent to live with cousins she has never met in the provincial town of Provins. The Rogrons are former shopkeepers newly arrived at modest prosperity and desperate for social respectability. What Pierrette provides them, from the first day, is an unpaid servant. What Provins provides the Rogrons is the political protection of a town whose ultra-royalist establishment prefers not to examine too closely what is happening in the Rogron household. By the time anyone looks closely enough, it is too late. Dinah de la Baudraye is the most intelligent person ...