The Bones of Paris

July 15, 2013
Edgar-winner King delivers a sequel to 2008’s Touchstone with this impressive mystery set in 1929 Paris. In the arresting preface, set in Cornwall, Bennett Grey receives a letter from Harris Stuyvesant, his friend but “a man whose motives Grey had reason to distrust,” containing four photographs whose contents are so disturbing that the suicidal Grey burns them immediately. The action then shifts to Paris 10 days earlier, where Stuyvesant, a former FBI man who left on bad terms with Hoover, is trying to trace a missing 22-year-old American woman, Pip Crosby. To the investigator, Crosby is just “one in a string of mostly blonde, mostly young women” who shared his bed, adding a patina of guilt to his inquiries. The trail leads him to a tantalizing mystery involving the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and artists who use human bones to create their work.Readers will hope to see more of Grey, who is absent for most of this story, and Stuyvesant in future books. Agent: Linda Allen, Linda Allen Literary Agency.

August 15, 2013
The dark side of Jazz Age Paris. Harris Stuyvesant didn't think any more of Philippa Crosby than of most of the young women he bedded. Their five-day fling certainly wasn't long enough to count as an affair. So when Pip goes missing and her uncle Ernest, knowing of Stuyvesant's past experience with the FBI, asks him to find her, the man's in an awkward position. Already nagged with guilt over his failure to protect his former lover Sarah Grey from criminal horrors three years ago (Touchstone, 2008), he takes the case and proceeds to make inquiries, beginning with Pip's tearful Southern California roommate, Nancy Berger. In no time at all, Stuyvesant is up to his spats in period detail, celebrity walk-ons (Sylvia Beach, Bricktop, Cole Porter) and distinctly kinky intimations. Pip's acquaintance with artist/provocateur Man Ray, who photographed her in a highly suggestive pose, is only the tip of the iceberg. Sarah's boss, Comte Dominic de Charmentier, is intimately connected with the "death pornography" of the scandalous theatrical productions that made the Grand-Guignol a trademark for grotesquerie. King presents Stuyvesant's tour of the lower depths of the Parisian avant-garde in terms both decorous and creepy. By the time Sarah and her brother Bennett, a human lie detector who retired from working with Stuyvesant to a Dorset farm, return to his life, his suspicion that Pip's was only one of a long line of disappearances has made him a changed man who has to admit that "the odors of life are not always pleasant"--even in 1929 Paris. Evocative period detail and challenging aesthetic adventures compensate for a mystery more suggestive than believable and a climactic sequence that seems to have been lifted from King's last tale of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (Garment of Shadows, 2012).

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February 15, 2014
In this sequel to "Touchstone", it's 1929 and former FBI agent Harris Stuyvesant is freelancing in Europe as a tracer of lost persons. On the trail of a young woman last seen in Paris, Stuyvesant begins to suspect that his quarry has been murdered, possibly to garner female bones for gruesome avant-garde artistic projects. Stuyvesant's prescient friend Bennett Grey assists in deciphering evidence, and Sarah Grey, his former lover, turns up employed by a key suspect. King sets the action in Jazz Age Paris above the stacked bones of the Paris catacombs as Stuyvesant wanders Montparnasse and brushes against expatriate writers and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, and Man Ray. Stage actor Jefferson Mays's nonchalantly masculine delivery keeps the listener intrigued and hungry for the next chapter. VERDICT This atmospheric mystery will please King fans and newbies alike. ["Murder is beside the point here, with the novel offering instead a paean to Jazz Age Paris, which King clearly evokes," read the review of the Bantam hc, "LJ" Xpress Reviews, 8/16/13.]--Judith Robinson, Dept. of Lib. & Information Studies, Univ. at Buffalo

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2013
King takes a break from her popular Mary Russell series to return to the story of Harris Stuyvesant from Touchstone (2008). Formerly an FBI agent and now a dissolute PI, Harris is still haunted by the events in the earlier book, which left his lover, Sarah, maimed. Needing work, he accepts a missing-persons job that takes him to Paris in 1929 and offers the possibility of reuniting with Sarah. Fans of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris will feel right at home in the Jazz Age Paris setting, though many of the famous Lost Generation figures are portrayed in a much less flattering light here (artist Man Ray, in particular, is a misogynist and murder suspect). The story is complex, more than a little kinky, and absolutely fascinating. The missing girl Harris seeks turns out to be only one of many missing persons who came into the orbit of a group of offbeat Parisian artists whose credo demands that art be visceral. Could the infamous Moreau, who creates tableaux using human bones to suggest the corruption of the flesh, be somehow connected to the missing young people? Harris noses about through familiar Left Bank haunts, encountering the era's usual suspects (Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Cole Porter, and Josephine Baker, among them), but beyond the cameos and the bohemian atmosphere, there is a compelling thriller here and some fascinating fictional characters to go with the real-life ones. As always with King, the plot is tricky but marvelously constructed, delivering twists that not only surprise but also deepen the story and its multiple levels of meaning. Break out that dusty bottle of absinthe you have stored away and settle in for a treat. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: King's Mary Russell novels are her biggest sellers, but Touchstone hit the extended New York Times list, and this follow-up has Paris and the Lost Generation going for it. And don't discount the web-savvy King, who does online promotion as well as any author out there.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)