Masquerade

The second case for 'The Pinkerton Pair' Phil Beaumont, the laconic professional ("Are all the Pinkertons as good looking as you are?" "All of them," I said. "It's a requirement.") and the innocent, but far from na ve Jane Turner who is keen to earn her spurs with the famous detective agency ("I am not only a femme fatale, I am also a Pinkerton.")

The pair are employed to investigate the death of rich American publisher Richard Forsythe, supposedly killed as part of a suicide pact with his German lover in his Paris apartment. As Jane Turner travels undercover as a governess with members of the family across France, Beaumont is plunged into the heady world of 1923 Parisian society and underworld, literally, from the elegant cafes down into its sewers and catacombs. It is a world populated by famous and often dangerous eccentrics, including the socially inept and fantastically clumsy Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Sybil Norton - an English detective novelist famous for her book The Mysterious Affair at Pyles - and Henri Ledoq, a French policeman with more interest in fine wines and gourmet dining than in detection.

First UK publication.