After the End
Belgian author Abel made her U.S. debut with 2023’s Mothers’ Instinct, adapted for a 2024 film starring Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. Her new domestic thriller is a standalone sequel set eight years later, about a single mother of two whose new neighbors come with a houseful of deadly secrets.
Blood Bound
In this first volume of a trilogy by Québécoise author Poisson, a costume historian in Paris discovers a bloodstained dress bearing the coat of arms of Madame de Pompadour. The garment may hold the key to a genealogical mystery: Did the marquise’s son, widely believed to have died in infancy, survive? And if so, why hide his existence?
The Story of Marceau Miller
The first translated work of fiction on Blackstone Publishing’s print list is the debut of a pseudonymous author said to be a screenwriter living in France. In the novel, renowned author Marceau Miller is found dead in the Lake Geneva region. His widow discovers his final manuscript and sets out to uncover whether her husband’s death was an accident or something more sinister.
Symphony of Monsters
“Levy tackles Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine in this affecting thriller about a mother’s desperate search for her missing son,” according to PW’s review; the boy has been kidnapped as part of a scheme to take 200,000 Ukrainian children to Russia to become Russian Federation citizens. The author, whose 26 novels have been translated into 50 languages, was recently awarded the prestigious Légion d’honneur in his native France.
The Thief
Originally published in 1897, rediscovered in the 1950s, but never before available in an English translation, this novel by French anarchist Darien (1862–1921) follows a young man who’s cheated out of his inheritance and turns to a life of crime. The 1967 film adaptation, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, is known in English as The Thief of Paris.
