Murder on the Eiffel Tower

Author: Claude Izner
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 142995311X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Murder on the Eiffel Tower is painstakingly researched, an effortless evocation of the glorious City of Light, and an exciting opening to a promising series featuring Victor Legris. The brand-new, shiny Eiffel Tower is the pride and glory of the 1889 World Exposition. But one sunny afternoon, as visitors are crowding the viewing platforms, a woman collapses and dies on this great Paris landmark. Can a bee sting really be the cause of death? Or is there a more sinister explanation? Enter young bookseller Victor Legris. Present on the tower at the time of the incident, and appalled by the media coverage of the occurrence, he is determined to find out what actually happened. In this dazzling evocation of late nineteenth-century Paris, we follow Victor as his investigation takes him all over the city and he suspects an ever-changing list of possible perpetrators. Could mysterious Kenji Mori, his surrogate father and business partner at the bookstore Legris operates, be involved in the crime? Why are beautiful Russian illustrator Tasha and her colleagues at the newly launched sensationalist newspaper Passepartout always up-to-date in their reporting? And what will Legris do when the deaths begin to multiply and he is caught in a race against time? Winner of the prestigious Michel Lebrun French Thriller Prize

In the Shadows of Paris

Author: Claude Izner
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1250012104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
In In the Shadows of Paris, the fifth installment in this c'est magnifique Victor Legris series by Claude Izner, a murderer is at large in belle-epoque Paris. In the turbulent Parisian summer of 1893,Victor Legris has vowed to his fiancée to give up the dangerous hobby of amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books. But a killer is at large, leaving mysterious references to a leopard in his notes, and intent on revenge for events that took place many years before during the Commune. When a bookbinder friend of Victor's dies in a house fire that does not seem to be accidental, the young bookseller feels impelled to resume his detective work and uncover the identity of the Batignolles predator. Alongside his trusty assistant Jojo, Victor embarks on a new investigation in the bourgeois quarters of Paris, where scoundrels abound and streethawkers call out their wares among market stalls, under the bloody shadow of the Commune.

The Montmartre Investigation

Author: Claude Izner
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429939206
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
The fast-paced and gripping third title in the bestselling Victor Legris mystery series Paris, November 1891: The body of a barefoot young woman dressed in red is discovered on Boulevard Montmartre. She has been strangled and her face horribly disfigured. That same day a single red shoe is delivered to Victor Legris's Parisian bookshop by a goatherd. Suspecting more than just coincidence, the charming bookseller sleuth and his assistant Jojo are soon searching for the identity of both victim and murderer. Then, a body is discovered in a wine barrel at the same time as a famous performer from the legendary Moulin Rouge is strangled in her apartment. Victor's investigation takes him and Jojo into the dark alleyways and bustling cafes of the hills of Montmartre, on a trail of evidence that seems to point to a case that shocked the population of Lyons years ago.

Murder Below Montparnasse

Author: Cara Black
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616952164
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
A long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother’s blood vendetta, a Soviet secret that’s been buried for 80 years—Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc’s current case is her most exciting one yet. The cobbled streets of Montparnasse might have been boho-chic in the 1920s, when artists, writers, and their muses drank absinthe and danced on cafe tables. But to Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc, these streets hold darker secrets. When an old Russian man named Yuri hires Aimée to protect a priceless painting that just might be a Modigliani, she learns how deadly art theft can be. Yuri is found tortured to death in his atelier, and the painting is missing. Every time Aimée thinks she's found a new witness, the body count rises. What exactly is so special about this painting that so many people are willing to kill—and die—for it?

The Marais Assassin

Author: Claude Izner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Booksellers and bookselling
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Parisian bookseller Victor Legris finds a new case to investigate very close to home, when his business partner's apartment is burgled. Curiously the only item stolen is a decorative goblet of little value. But on learning that two people have been murdered who were connected to to the goblet, Victor becomes convinced of its secret significance. How quickly can he recover it and end the killing spree, in a city beset with terrorist activity? In this fourth case for the bookseller sleuth, Claude Izner offers a convincing portrait of a Paris shaken by anarchist bombings in the spring of 1892.

The Visible Word

Author: Johanna Drucker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226165027
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Drucker explores the context for experimental typography in terms of printing, handwriting, and other practices concerned with the visual representation of language. Her book concludes with a brief look at the ways in which experimental techniques of the early avant-garde were transformed in both literary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Three Hours in Paris

Author: Cara Black
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 164129258X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light—abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why. Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assignment: assassinate the Führer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve. But other than rushed and rudimentary instruction, she has no formal spy training. Thrust into the red-hot center of the war, a country girl from rural Oregon finds herself holding the fate of the world in her hands. When Kate misses her mark and the plan unravels, Kate is on the run for her life—all the time wrestling with the suspicion that the whole operation was a set-up. New York Times bestselling author Cara Black is at her best as she brings Occupation-era France to vivid life in this masterful, pulse-pounding story about one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself. *Features an illustrated map of 1940s Paris as full color endpapers.

Mr. Timothy

Author: Louis Bayard
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061854182
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Book Description
From the author of Courting Mr. Lincoln comes a different kind of Christmas story featuring a grown up Tiny Tim, this breathless flight through the teeming markets, shadowy passageways, and rolling brown fog of 1860s London would do Dickens proud for its surprising twists and turns, and its extraordinary heart. It's the Christmas season, and Mr. Timothy Cratchit, not the pious child the world thought he was, has just buried his father. He's also struggling to bury his past as a cripple and shed his financial ties to his benevolent "Uncle" Ebenezer by losing himself in the thick of London's underbelly. He boards at a brothel in exchange for teaching the mistress how to read and spends his nights dredging the Thames for dead bodies and the treasures in their pockets. Timothy's life takes a sharp turn when he discovers the bodies of two dead girls, each seared with the same cruel brand on the upper arm. The sight of their horror-struck faces compels Timothy to become the protector of another young girl, Philomela, from the fate the others suffered at the hands of a dangerous and powerful man.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Author: Muriel Barbery
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609450132
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The phenomenal New York Times bestseller that “explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building” (Publishers Weekly). In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible—short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she’s everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: She furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor, she scrutinizes the lives of the tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth. Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives on the fifth floor. Talented and precocious, she’s come to terms with life’s seeming futility and decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Until then, she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop culture, a good but not outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide their true talents and finest qualities from a world they believe cannot or will not appreciate them. But after a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building, they will begin to recognize each other as kindred souls, in a novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us, and “teaches philosophical lessons by shrewdly exposing rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors” (Kirkus Reviews). “The narrators’ kinetic minds and engaging voices (in Alison Anderson’s fluent translation) propel us ahead.” —The New York Times Book Review “Barbery’s sly wit . . . bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations.” —The New Yorker

A Critic Writes

Author: Reyner Banham
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520923200
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Book Description
Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.