Arcadia Public Library

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"In 1999, in the small provincial town of Beauval, France, twelve-year-old Antoine Courtin accidentally kills a young neighbor boy in the woods near his home. Panicked, he conceals the body and to his relief--and ongoing shame--he is never suspected of any connection to the child's disappearance. But the boy's death continues to haunt him, shaping his life in unseen ways. More than a decade later, Antoine is living in Paris, now a young doctor with...

Deals with the conflicts and thoughts of a young Jewish concentration-camp veteran as he prepares to assassinate a British hostage in occupied Palestine.

Victor has messed up his vows during a wedding rehearsal, and is traveling through the woods, reciting his vows. He stops to rest in the woods, and while practicing. He finally gets them right and ceremoniously puts the wedding ring on a finger-shaped stick in the ground and says his wedding vows. The stick turns out to be a rotted finger belonging to a murdered girl who has returned as a zombie and insists that she is now Victor's lawfully wedded...

"They find the boy by the swimming pool, dolls floating on its surface. Inside the house, his teacher lies dead. But he claims to remember nothing. June 2010. In the middle of a World Cup match, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic e-mail indicating that Julian Hirtmann,...

"Crime, suspense, and marital woes combine in this atmospheric procedural set in the seemingly quiet Mediterranean town of Perpignan"--Amazon.

"A bestseller in France and winner of the Prix Renaudot, By a Slow River is a mesmerizing and atmospheric tale of three mysterious deaths in an oddly isolated French village during World War I. The placid daily life of a small town near the front seems impervious to the nearby pounding of artillery fire and the parade of wounded strangers passing through its streets. But the illusion of calm is soon shattered by the deaths of three innocents-the charming...

In this sequel to Syndrome E, Lucie Henebelle and Inspector Sharko have reunited to take on the case of the brutal murder of Eva Louts, a promising graduate student who was killed while working at a primate research center outside Paris. But what first appears to be a vicious animal attack soon proves to be something more sinister. What was Eva secretly researching? Was she tracking three fanatical scientists who control a thirty-thousand-year-old...

"In a snowbound valley, deep in the French Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylums's...

"In a small Parisian square, the ancient tradition of the town crier continues into modern times. The self-appointed crier, Joss Le Guern, reads out the daily news, snippets of gossip, and lately, ominous messages placed in his handmade wooden message box by an annonymous source that warn of an imminent onset of the bubonic plague."