A Royal Prisoner

The most notorious villain in French popular fiction finally gets his due in this breathless mystery. Fantômas, the shape-shifting master criminal who dominated the European imagination a century before Bond, makes his presence felt in every shadow of this intricate tale. When journalist Jerome Fandor wanders home from a New Year's Eve celebration in Paris, he stumbles into a royal scandal that will entangle him with kings, mistresses, and a detective whose obsession with Fantômas borders on the pathological. A woman falls from a window. A king is implicated. And Fandor finds himself caught between truth and the kind of deception that could bring down empires. This is pulp fiction at its most audacious, a window into a Paris that thrills and corrupts in equal measure.