A gruesome arson case takes St-Cyr and Kohler to Lyon....

In a packed movie theater, an usher notices two women enter and leave just before the show begins. Moments later, the theater goes up in flames, and 183 people perish in the stampede to escape. By the time investigators Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler arrive from Paris, the charred bodies are frozen solid.

It is two days before Christmas, 1942, and the people of Lyon are terrified. As the detectives try to unravel what happened in that packed movie house, the arsonists plan their next attack. Saving Lyon from fire will force St-Cyr and Kohler to confront the worst of human nature, in a city lorded over by one of the most infamous Nazis of the Second World War.

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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