Southwest France. Commandant Martin Servaz, who has left his job due to a bout with depression, receives an envelope in the mail containing the keys to a hotel room in which an artist had killed herself one year before. Someone must want Servaz to come out of retirement, against the doctors’ orders and unknown to his colleagues and superiors. Someone wants certain paths to cross, a dangerous proposition: those of Christine Steinmeyer, a radio host accused of murder on live radio, Servaz himself and the artist from the hotel room. What if our loved ones are not who we think they are? And what if certain secrets hidden away simply won’t die?

Bernard Minier (Béziers, 1960) lives in Paris. His first novel, The Frozen Dead, earned him the prize for best novel in French at the Cognac Detective Film Festival in 2011, and the Prix de l’Embouchure in 2012, and introduced readers to Commandant Martin Servaz, who return as the protagonist of Minier’s next few novels as well as the TV miniseries The Frozen Dead, awarded Best TV Series at the La Rochelle Film Festival in 2016; it aired in France in early 2017. For his novel The Circle, Minier won the 2013 Prix des Bibliothèques et des Médiathèques de Grand Cognac. After his next novel, Don’t Turn Out the Lights, Minier went on to win the award for best novel in French at the Cognac Festival once again in 2015, for his book Une putain d’histoire. His latest novel is Nuit, the fourth in the series starring Martin Servaz, the forty-year old French police officer, divorced, a loner, something of a misanthrope: the cop who wanted to be a writer, until his mother was killed and his father committed suicide, and he became a detective to crack the case.