Messengers of Evil

Paris has a new nightmare. Fantômas kills because he can, because he delights in it, because the act of murder itself is the only theology he acknowledges. This is no gentleman thief in the tradition of Arsène Lupin. This is something far worse: a shape-shifting predator who wears the faces of his victims like costumes, who slips into high society and disappears into the city's darkness with equal ease. He has no origin, no mercy, no code. He is pure criminal id, and Inspector Juve has dedicated his life to catching a ghost that refuses to be defined.Messengers of Evil opens with the brutalized body of the Baroness de Vibray discovered in a ceramicist's studio and spirals into ever more baroque cruelties: plague rats loosed upon the innocent, giant snakes in the night, chambers that flood with sand. Yet for all Juve's relentless pursuit, Fantômas remains always one step ahead, vanishing at railway stations, escaping through hidden passages, leaving only chaos and mockery in his wake. The detective's defeat is absolute, the criminal's triumph complete, for now. The chase continues, but no one knows how it ends.