The Bones of Paris

By: Laurie R. King

Narrated by: Jefferson Mays

Paris, 1929. For Harris Stuyvesant, his current assignment is a private investigator's dream - he's getting paid to trawl the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, looking for a pretty young woman. The missing person in question is Philippa Crosby, a 22-year-old from Boston, whose family have become alarmed at her lack of communication.

As Stuyvesant follows Philippa's trail through Paris, he finds that she is known to many of its famous - and infamous - inhabitants, from Shakespeare and Company's Sylvia Beach to the surrealist photographer Man Ray. But when the evidence leads Stuyvesant to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, his investigation takes a sharp and disturbing turn.

At the Grand-Guignol, murder, insanity, and sexual perversion are all staged to shocking, brutal effect: depravity as art, violence as a form of beauty. Soon it becomes clear that one missing girl is a drop in the ocean. Somewhere amid the glittering city lights hides a monster whose artistic coup de grâce is to be rendered in blood. And Stuyvesant will have to descend into the darkest depths of perversion to find the killer...sifting through the bones of Paris.

©2013 Laurie R. King (P)2013 Recorded Books Inc

Not for the squeamish; but excellent King!

Different than any of her previous I have read. Unlike other reviewers. I enjoyed the celebrity name dropping. I enjoyed her nuanced characters also; King is creating quite the journey for us with them. The last scenes were well drawn; put me right in those spaces. Her description of madness was well plotted and plausible for survivors of war. More evidence for why we humans should not create it...