The French Revolution is vividly brought to life in a brilliant retelling of the classic story that has captured the imagination of readers since the 1850s.
In Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," Sydney Carton is an almost ancillary character. Dickens' novel tells us the stories of Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Alexandre Manette. Carton disappears from the novel for eleven chapters and several years, reappearing without warning to bring the novel to its chilling and heartbreaking end. Yet Dickens is silent about the circumstances that transformed Carton from a promising youth to...
The French Revolution is vividly brought to life in a brilliant retelling of the classic story that has captured the imagination of readers since the ...
Charles-Henri Sanson has good looks, a fine education, and plenty of money: everything, in fact, that a stylish young Parisian could ask for. He also has an infamous family name-and he's trapped in a hideous job that no one wants.
The last thing Charles ever wanted to be was a hangman. But he's the eldest son of Paris's most dreaded public official, and in the 1750s, after centuries of superstition, people like him are outcasts. He knows that the executioner's son must become an executioner himself or starve, for all doors are closed to him; although he loathes the role and would much...
Charles-Henri Sanson has good looks, a fine education, and plenty of money: everything, in fact, that a stylish young Parisian could ask for. He also ...
In the icy winter of 1786, in the final years before the French Revolution, hunger, cold, and seething frustration with the iron grip of France's absolute monarchy drive poor and rich alike to outright defiance. Slums, fashionable cafes, and even aristocratic mansions echo with discontent and the first warning signals of the approaching turmoil of 1789.
Paris's cemeteries are foul and disease-ridden, but no one, including penniless writer Aristide Ravel, expects to find a man with his throat cut lying dead in a churchyard, surrounded by strange Masonic symbols. Already suspected of...
In the icy winter of 1786, in the final years before the French Revolution, hunger, cold, and seething frustration with the iron grip of France's abso...
Paris, 1796. Aristide Ravel, freelance undercover police agent and investigator, is confronted with a double murder in a fashionable apartment. The victims are Celie Montereau, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family, and the man who was blackmailing her. Rosalie Clement, an enigmatic, bitter young woman, provides information that steers Ravel toward a young man with a violent past who was in love with Celie, but further inquiry reveals that-according to an eyewitness-he cannot have been her murderer. And recent, notorious miscarriages of justice lead Ravel, beset with fears of...
Paris, 1796. Aristide Ravel, freelance undercover police agent and investigator, is confronted with a double murder in a fashionable apartment. The vi...
Louis XVI is in his grave, and Marie-Antoinette is on her way to trial. Paris is hungry, restless, and fearful in the autumn of 1793, and the guillotine's blade is beginning to fall daily on the necks of enemies of the French Republic. Not even members of the republican government are safe from the threat of the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the only sentence for the guilty is death.
In this atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, police agent Aristide Ravel, while coming to terms with personal tragedy, must stop a ruthless killer who is terrorizing the city. Ravel soon learns, however, that...
Louis XVI is in his grave, and Marie-Antoinette is on her way to trial. Paris is hungry, restless, and fearful in the autumn of 1793, and the guilloti...
