Kaleidoscope - Softcover

December 1942. Jean-Louis St-Cyr and Hermann Kohler have been dispatched to Provence to investigate a local murder. A woman lies dead on a hillside, an iron-tipped bolt through her heart. The Provençals are uncooperative, fearful of Nazi reprisals. Before the murder is solved, the inspectors will be drawn into a web of collusion as intricate and shifting as the patterns of a kaleidoscope.

J. Robert Janes's previous titles in this series include Mayhem, Mannequin, Sandman, Salamander, Stonekiller, and Carousel, all available from Soho Crime.

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he started writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series.

In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The thirteenth in the series, Bellringer, was published in 2012.