Adapted for television in France, the first of the Nicolas Le Floch mysteries tells the story of murder against the backdrop of the glittering court of Louis XV. 'Has all the twists, turns and surprises the genre demands' Independent on Sunday It's France, 1761. Beyond the glittering court of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour at Versailles, lies Paris, a capital in the grip of crime and immorality ... A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young recruit to the force, is instructed to find him. When unidentified human remains suddenly come to light, he seems to have a murder investigation on his hands. As the city descends into Carnival debauchery, Le Floch will need all his skill, courage and integrity to unravel a mystery which threatens to implicate the highest in the land. This is the first in a series of six historical crime novels which has sold in excess of 400,000 copies in French. The author brings eighteenth-century Paris vividly to life and the story features real-life characters Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV as well as engaging hero Nicolas le Floch.

Paris, February 1761. A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young Breton police recruit is instructed to find him ...

At the court of young King Louis XVI , conspiracies abound...Under the distrustful eye of his new boss at the Chatelet, Nicolas Le Floch investigates the bizarre death of a maid at the home of Monsieur de Saint-Florentin, the King's minister. When a second murder is washed up by the Seine with the same curious injuries, events begin to gather pace, leading Le Floch to Versailles, as he attempts to solve what is far more than a simple case of murder.

Paris is in mourning. At the fireworks display marking the Dauphin's marriage to Marie Antoinette, hundreds of people have been injured or crushed to death. Yet not all the victims died accidentally...This tragic incident yields a new case for Commissioner Le Floch when a strangled woman is found amongst the other corpses.The investigation will lead him to the home of a furrier on Rue Royale and a terrifying encounter with supernatural forces.

Adapted for television in France, the fourth of the Nicolas Le Floch mysteries sees the protagonist accused of murdering a socialite - with whom he was about to end a stormy affair. 'Parot succeeds brilliantly in his reconstruction of pre-revolutionary Paris' The Times Paris, 1774. Commissioner Le Floch's stormy love affair with socialite Julie de Lasterieux has run its course. But before Nicolas can formally end the relationship, Julie is found murdered in her bed, a victim of poisoning. For now, he retains the confidence of even the King, who sends him on a secret intelligence mission. But a plot is afoot to implicate Nicolas in Julie's death, and he is soon fighting to uncover the perpetrators and clear his name.

In the sixth of the Nicolas Le Floch mysteries, Le Floch investigates a baker’s death amid outcry at soaring bread prices, told 'in splendid period detail' [Sunday Times]. ‘An engaging murder mystery' FT 1775. Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch is on a diplomatic mission to Vienna, ostensibly to deliver a bust of Marie Antoinette to her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. His real task, however, is to investigate the breakdown of French secret intelligence in Austria. The city is a hotbed of plotting – and Nicolas only just survives an attempt on his life. On his return to France, Paris is in turmoil. The soaring price of grain and bread is causing widespread social unrest, and Nicolas’ first police case is the unexplained death of a baker. Could it be that events in the French capital are somehow connected to his experiences in Vienna …?

Paris, 1774. Commissioner Le Floch's stormy love affair with socialite Julie de Lasterieux has run its course. But before Nicolas can formally end the relationship, Julie is found murdered in her bed, a victim of poisoning. For now, he retains the confidence of even the King, who sends him on a secret intelligence mission. But a plot is afoot to implicate Nicolas in Julie's death, and he is soon fighting to uncover the perpetrators and clear his name."

Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really see the city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book, Marc Auge takes readers below Paris in a work that is both an ethnography of the city and a personal narrative. Guiding us through history, memory, and physical space, Auge juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the reality of multiethnic urban France. His work is part autobiography, with impressions from a lifetime riding the trains; part meditation on self and memory reflected in the people and places underneath Paris; part analysis of a place where the third world and the first world meet, where remnants of cultures move and press together; and part a reflection on anthropology in an era of globalization and urban development. Although he is a pillar of French thought, In the Metro is Auge's first major critical and creative work translated into English. It shows him to be firmly rooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Auge's idiosyncratic and innovative approach, the act of observing the quotidian is elevated to an art. The writer and his history become part of the field he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site -- urban life -- usually reserved for sociology and cultural studies. Throughout, Auge reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature -- an eclectic egalitarian society.

October 1761 finds the newly-promoted Commisioner Le Floch on duty at a royal performance of Rameau's latest work.Events take a dramatic turn and Nicolas is soon embarked on his second major investigation when the body of a prominent courtier's son is found.The initial evidence points to suicide, but Le Floch's instincts tell him he is dealing with murder of the most gruesome kind.

In the second of the Napoleonic Murders series, described as a 'splendid war epic' by Sunday Telegraph, a serial killer is targeting young army recruits. In 1809, the forces of Napoleon's Grande Armée are in Austria. For young Lieutenant Lukas Relmyer, it is hard to return to the place where he and fellow orphan Franz, were kidnapped four years previously. Franz was brutally murdered and Lukas has vowed to avenge his death. When the body of another orphan is found on the battlefield, Captain Quentin Margont and Lukas join forces to track down the wolf that is prowling once more in the forests of Aspern...