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 kept woman's murder leads detectives St-Cyr and Kohler to the upper crust of occupied Paris It is December 1942, and the Parisian Gestapo agents pass their days by executing dissidents and plotting the destruction of the Resistance. Homicide detectives Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler, meanwhile, must make do solving the gritty crimes with which the Nazi elite do not bother. Just hours after they learn that St-Cyr's wife and child have died,...

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...

A schoolteacher enters a war of shadows to save his daughter from the 3rd Reich. David Ashby spent the last war killing Germans, and the years after falling in love with one. By the time Hitler comes to power, David has a half-German daughter, Karen, whom he loves more than life itself. So when Europe begins to slide toward war, and it becomes unsafe for an American to stay in the Fatherland, David does the only thing he can: He flees - and takes...

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...

A woman is found butchered not far from an archaeological site In the woods of the Dordogne, farmers and their pigs hunt the forest floor for truffles. It is June 1942, and one such farmer has found something unusual: the postmaster's wife, murdered and left to rot beneath the trees. By the time police inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler arrive from Paris, she has been dead four days, and the flies have begun to feast. As Kohler combs...

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...

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...