St-Cyr and Kohler uncover a black market beekeeping conspiracy

During winter, the bees of Paris huddle into spheres, sacrificing some of the drones to keep the queen warm. In the winter of 1943, as rationing limits access to luxury goods, those at the top of Parisian society think nothing of sacrificing the poor for the sake of the black market.

The latest casualty is a beekeeper, murdered in his apiary after getting in the way of a smuggling operation. The next night, burglars rob his hives, taking several kilos of honey at the expense of 300,000 bees. As news filters in about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in the fight for Stalingrad, the massacre of the bees seems insignificant. But to inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler, the dead bees point to a conspiracy that, if revealed, could send Paris into revolt.

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he started writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series.
In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The thirteenth in the series, Bellringer, was published in 2012. 

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