Bed of Nails

Guerin is not your typical policeman. Sitting in a dingy office at the back of a vast Parisian police station, he reviews the files of suicides to check that their deaths really were self-inflicted. He lives and works under a cloud of suspicion: the suicide of a former colleague is blamed by everyone in the force on his maverick methods of investigation. Guerin's two most recent suicide cases share striking similarities. Both concern young men who died naked in very public places. He is convinced the two deaths are linked, but his intuition is ridiculed by all but his loyal assistant, Lambert. Increasingly obsessed by this morbid coincidence, Guerin encounters John Nichols, an American former psychiatrist who has been called to Paris to identify the body of a friend, yet another suicide. As the bizarre death cult tightens its vice-like grip on the city, Guerin and Nichol's parallel investigations uncover evidence of shocking abuse, both in the upper echelons of the police force and at the US embassy. Antonin Varenne is a new and powerful voice in crime fiction; Bed of Nails engages with the violence at the heart of society, and the darkest elements of human nature.


Genre: Mystery