J. Robert Janes

In the dead of winter, a serial killer targets the children of Paris It is January 1943, and as Germany reels from the defeat at Stalingrad, Hermann Kohler learns that his sons were among the German casualties. He has no choice but to set grief aside and continue working, solving everyday cases in and around Paris. Today he and his partner, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, examine the corpse of a murdered girl. As St-Cyr examines the crime scene, Kohler is overwhelmed;...

Amid the ruins of an abandoned Alsatian carnival, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate a pair of suspicious suicides.During the Great War, Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr fought in Alsace on opposite sides of the barbed wire. Two decades later, they return as partners: a Gestapo officer and a French cop investigating everyday crimes in a world gone mad with war. In February 1943, Alsace is unrecognizable--an occupied country where speaking French is...

A high-ranking German sailor is accused of petty, brutal murder As Allied bombers rain death on the German submarine pens of occupied France, police inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler stumble through the darkness to a crime scene. A shopkeeper lies dead, head bashed in with a railway tie, surrounded by fragments of a shattered porcelain doll. It appears to be an open-and-shut case, which would make the detectives' job simple if the obvious...

A series of interlocking crimes send St-Cyr and Kohler into the heart of the Parisian underworld It is February 1943, and Paris is under a blackout. For three years, the French inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo have investigated the mundane violence of Nazi-occupied France, but never have they experienced such a cold, sleeting winter. While investigating a burgled stamp collector's shop, they get a call telling them that...

A woman is brutally murdered in Avignon's Papal Palace Six hundred years before the Germans conquered Paris, the pope came to Avignon to rule the Roman Church from afar. In January 1943, Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler visit the former Papal Palace-not as tourists, but as detectives. Where once the pope spoke to God, a woman has had her throat cut.   Her corpse seems to have appeared from out of the past. Despite the strictures of wartime rationing,...

In Vichy, a dead mistress points to an assassination plot At the Battle of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Pétain's heroic leadership won him the respect and admiration of all of France. In the decades that follow the Great War, his ambition is boundless, but not until Hitler arrives does he claim the job he's always wanted. When the Wehrmacht subdue the French army, Pétain takes the reins of his conquered nation, becoming World War II's most infamous...

In Provence, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate an old-fashioned murder The train ride from Paris is supposed to take four hours, but a Resistance bomb has snarled the tracks, and detectives Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler are fourteen hours behind schedule. By the time they arrive in Provence, they are travel-weary but intrigued. Even in wartime, it's rare to investigate a murder by crossbow.   The woman was in her early fifties, with well-made...

An international safecracker steals diamonds destined for the Reich A tip comes in to the Gestapo, warning of an impending burglary at the Paris Ritz. The target is the room of a special attaché to the German Ministry of Production, where a safe contains a cache of diamonds intended for use in arms manufacture. When inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler arrive, backed up by a Berlin cop, the safe is intact. But when they turn the dial to...

A young girl vanishes, leaving nothing behind but a pile of nude photos Since the Germans occupied Paris, police inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr has not been able to work a murder, robbery, or arson case without his German overlords demanding he work faster. His partner, Bavarian detective Hermann Kohler, does not share the sadism of many of his Gestapo colleagues, but he, too, has an obsession with speed. Their latest case calls for a sprint. For if...

Caught between empires, a young woman risks her life for Ireland Mary Ellen Fraser speeds down the lonely country road, aware that no matter how fast she drives, she cannot outrun the secret in her heart. In the POW camps of Northern Ireland, this doctor's wife found a lover-a handsome German officer who begged her to smuggle a letter to his cousin. But the cousin is a lie, and the note is really an encoded message for Admiral Dönitz, high commander...