The Maintenon Mysteries

Investigating the bow and arrow murder of Marko Dubzek at a naturist park just south of town presents Inspector Gilles Maintenon with a pretty pickle indeed. The eighth in Louis Shalako’s The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, this intriguing noir mystery will not disappoint.

Opera star Largo Banzini is killed by a dart from a blowgun at the end of Act One of The Golden Dragon. It’s an impossible crime, and Inspector Gilles Maintenon, who lost his wife Ann only a short time ago, has been a bit off lately. This is the seventh volume in The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

Inspector Gilles Maintenon has finally run up against an original mind—someone who’s very good at wasting his time. Their killer, using simple human psychology, has come up with a brilliant plan. Gilles would dearly love to meet the mind that conceived of that plan. He intends to do just that.

To fall in love is to be young again. To count the cost is to die a little bit inside. In Speak Softly My Love, Inspector Gilles Maintenon goes out for a quart of milk and stumbles across a dead man. The trouble is, when the dead get up and walk away. They have one too many missing-person reports, too many wives, girlfriends and other mysterious blondes.

Aldrich Tobias, the man the critics love to hate, sits in La Prison Santé, awaiting the guillotine. The President of the Republic has asked Detective-Sergeant Gilles Maintenon to take another look into the case. According to Aldrich Tobias, ‘The artist is mad—always mad.” Maintenon is about to find out what that really means.

It was a crime of pure arrogance. Madame Muriel Ducharme was murdered in what looks like a break-in gone wrong. It’s a little too pat for Inspector Gilles Maintenon. Nothing appears to have been taken, but the killer has thought of that too.

Inventor Theo Duval appeared to be having the perfect life. A locked room with the only key in the decedent’s pocket, a book on hypnotism, and one very rich and very dead inventor, present Inspector Gilles Maintenon of the Surete with a problem. Why would a young, healthy, successful man, one with a beautiful fiance, and a thriving company ever want to kill himself?

Recently widowed and inspired by a boyhood fascination with Sherlock Holmes, the middle-aged Inspector Gilles Maintenon of the Surete is on a walking vacation of Dartmoor when he stumbles upon death in mysterious circumstances. When the woman he is falling in love with is brutally murdered, Gilles swears that he will never rest until the case is solved, the killer is caught, and justice is done.

The Handbag's Tale is a highly-stylized murder mystery. Readers will enjoy a rich vein of dark and sardonic humour. Nana the Snake Dancer, poets, painters, proprietors of bawdy houses, inept burglars, and Inspector Gilles Maintenon make an unforgettable tale of a classic time and place: It's Paris, 1924, at the height of party season.