The Paris Enigma: A Novel
In the tradition of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Eric Larsen’s The Devil in the White City comes The Paris Enigma, a gripping tale of murder and the art of crime solving. Written in a strikingly original voice, and poignantly evoking a world about to lose its innocence forever, The Paris Enigma features two detectives who find themselves in a race against time around glorious fin de siècle Paris, encountering all manner of secret societies and solving philosophical puzzles, while also trying to save a dangerously beautiful woman.
1103372535
The Paris Enigma: A Novel
In the tradition of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Eric Larsen’s The Devil in the White City comes The Paris Enigma, a gripping tale of murder and the art of crime solving. Written in a strikingly original voice, and poignantly evoking a world about to lose its innocence forever, The Paris Enigma features two detectives who find themselves in a race against time around glorious fin de siècle Paris, encountering all manner of secret societies and solving philosophical puzzles, while also trying to save a dangerously beautiful woman.
1.99 In Stock
The Paris Enigma: A Novel

The Paris Enigma: A Novel

by Pablo De Santis
The Paris Enigma: A Novel

The Paris Enigma: A Novel

by Pablo De Santis

eBook

$1.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

In the tradition of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Eric Larsen’s The Devil in the White City comes The Paris Enigma, a gripping tale of murder and the art of crime solving. Written in a strikingly original voice, and poignantly evoking a world about to lose its innocence forever, The Paris Enigma features two detectives who find themselves in a race against time around glorious fin de siècle Paris, encountering all manner of secret societies and solving philosophical puzzles, while also trying to save a dangerously beautiful woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061980343
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 10/06/2009
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 8,460
File size: 604 KB

About the Author

A journalist and comic-strip creator who became editorin chief of one of Argentina’s leading comics magazines,Pablo De Santis is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, one work of nonfiction, and a number of books for young adults. His works have been published in more than twenty countries. He lives in Buenos Aires.

Read an Excerpt

The Paris Enigma

Chapter One

My name is Sigmundo Salvatrio. My father came to Buenos Aires from a town north of Genoa and made his living as a cobbler. When he married my mother, he already owned a shoe-repair shop specializing in men's footwear (he never felt comfortable fixing women's shoes). As a child, I often helped him with this work. Today, people in my profession view my method for classifying fingerprints (the Salvatrio method) with high regard—I owe that crime-solving innovation to the many hours I spent among the lasts and soles that filled our shop. I came to realize that detectives and shoemakers see the world from beneath, both focusing more on the footsteps that have strayed away from their intended path than the path itself.

My father was no spendthrift. Every time my mother asked for a little extra money, Renzo Salvatrio would say that wanton spending would eventually force us to subsist on boiled boot soles as Napoleon's soldiers had done during their Russian campaign. But despite his frugality, once a year he allowed himself an extravagance: on my birthday he would buy me a jigsaw puzzle.

He began the tradition with a hundred-piece puzzle, and each year the puzzles got more and more complex, until finally they had fifteen hundred pieces. They were made in Trieste and came in wooden boxes. Once they were complete you'd discover a watercolor of the Dome of Milan, or the Parthenon, or an old map with monsters lying in wait at the ends of the Earth. It always took me many days to finish them. My father believed that jigsaw puzzles were rigorous training for mental and visual acuity. He helped me enthusiastically butgenerally wasn't very good because he paid more attention to the color of the pieces than to their shape. I let him do it his way, and then I fixed them when he wasn't looking.

"An investigation and a jigsaw puzzle have nothing in common," swore Renato Craig, who would later become my mentor. But nevertheless it was this hobby that, in February 1888, led me to answer the ad Craig published in the newspaper. Renato Craig, the famous detective, the only one in Buenos Aires, wanted to share his knowledge, for the first time, with a group of young people. Over the course of a year, the chosen students would learn the art of investigation, preparing them to assist even the best of detectives. I still have the newspaper clipping; the ad was on the same page as a story about the arrival of Kalidan, a Hindu magician touring the country.

The detective's ad excited me, not only because of what it heralded, but also because it meant that Craig, Craig the loner, was finally willing to allow other human beings to learn his methods. Craig was a founding member of The Twelve, a group of the most elite detectives in the world. It was Craig himself who introduced the term acolyte to The Twelve Detectives as a way to refer to their assistants. During one of the group's first meetings, in 1872, he explained this designation with a definition from a dictionary of Latinisms: ACOLYTE: said of one that follows another as if he were his shadow.

Every member of the club had his acolyte, except for Craig. In the magazine, The Key to Crime, Craig had often defended his position by saying that acolytes weren't necessary to a detective, and that the nature of the profession called for solitude. Another member of the group, Viktor Arzaky, who was Craig's good friend, had always been critical of this assessment. The fact that Craig was now willing to train assistants was a direct contradiction to his previous philosophy.

The Paris Enigma. Copyright © by Pablo De Santis. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews

Explore More Items