January 1943. The naval war in the North Atlantic is at its deadliest as a diminished Luftwaffe cannot defend the Brittany coast and its submarine stations from RAF bombers. Still, St-Cyr and Kohler continue to fight "common crime" under the Occupation.

A Breton shopkeeper has been murdered. The accused, a U-boat Kapitn, is a protégé of Admiral Doenitz and heir to a doll manufactory. Unwilling players in a tragedy driven by greed and revenge, St-Cyr and Kohler must also contend with a fiercely loyal submarine crew, all of whom refuse to put to sea without their beloved Dollmaker.

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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