About Treasure of Saint-Lazare: The war, an exquisite lost painting men have killed for, and a love that will not die. (The Eddie Grant Series Book 1):
TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE: Top-rated historical mystery of its year (Readers’ Favorite)
His long-ago lover brings a cryptic letter to Paris, pulling Eddie Grant reluctantly into a perilous web of love and death. A novel of Paris and World War II.
As a Special Forces commander, Eddie Grant learned well the lethal skills of close combat. When he took up his role as a wealthy and prominent Paris businessman, he doubted he would ever need them again. But when Jen Wetzmuller comes back into his life, rejuvenating his suppressed grief over the murder of his family, everything changes. Jen’s father is run down on a leafy Florida street, but leaves behind a letter hinting at the location of a priceless Renaissance painting he and Eddie’s had sought fruitlessly at the end of the war. Against his conscious will Eddie embarks on the path of revenge and redemption that will end only after he brings a rough vigilante justice to the murderers.
Along the way, he and Jen restart the brief, fiercely passionate affair that he abandoned, to his regret, twenty years before. The second time is at least as memorable as the first. It doesn’t last, but it does clear Eddie’s head and make it possible for him to restore relations with the love of his life, the beautiful Sorbonne professor he had once left behind.
Most of all, Treasure of Saint-Lazare is a novel of Paris
The painting, Portrait of a Young Man, is (or was) real. The Nazis stole it from a museum after they invaded Poland and it remains missing. The Polish government said at one time that it still exists and is in a safe place, but that is now in doubt.
“Bravo!” (Ronald Rosbottom, author of When Paris Went Dark)
“An exceptionally well written book with a fast-paced story line and many plot surprises.” (Connield, Amazon reviewer)
A “fast-paced thriller spanning the globe from Paris to the states.” (Carole P. Roman, Amazon reviewer)
“I read it once and then waited a week and read it again.” (Amazon reviewer)
“The bad guys were really bad, without any redeeming features. Read and enjoy.” (Amazon reviewer)
“A compelling tale that links the Hitler looting of priceless European art to contemporary murders.” (Amazon reviewer)
“I’ve never been to Paris until now.” (Amazon reviewer)
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Author Bio:
I’ve been a serious fan of Paris since the seventies, when my new wife Jan, already a frequent visitor, guided me on my first tour. In the decades since, we’ve lived in Germany and visited Paris many times, to the point that I feel as much at home there as I do in Sarasota, where we live for most of the year.
But we still spend part of the year in our favorite place, the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, the Montparnasse area where Hemingway and the other expat writers lived and wrote.
When we left Frankfurt in the mid-70s we spent a couple of months touring Italy and Greece before we returned to Washington. We spent hours probing the relics of classical civilization and enjoying the good food, and in my spare time I tried to starting writing a Cold War spy novel. I was going to be the next Le Carré. That didn’t work out so well — I found the notebook, containing several pages of a mangled opening chapter, on a closet shelf last year.
I got around to that first novel in 2012, after months of pondering a very different plot, one based on the knowledge of Paris I’d accumulated over dozens of visits. “Treasure of Saint-Lazare” came out at the end of the year, followed by “Last Stop: Paris” in 2015. The third, “Finding Pegasus,” is a 2018 project. I think I’m learning how to do it and can push up the pace a bit, so I hope to have a fourth one out in less than a year, and there’s a list of plots waiting for later.
The good people at Readers’ Favorite, the big review website, chose Treasure as its highest-ranked historical mystery of 2014. Shelf Unbound Magazine picked Last Stop as one of the ten best indie books of 2015, for which I thank both of them.
The books call on the wordsmithing skills I learned as an Associated Press reporter in Washington and as editor of an English-language business magazine in Germany. Jan, a former Washington Post reporter, edited her own magazine, and together we wrote special financial sections for the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times).
I left journalism when we came back from Germany and went into the securities industry, then we moved to Sarasota and bought a business. When we sold that I was able to turn my attention fully to learning how to be a novelist.
You can follow my blog at PartTimeParisian.com and my books at JohnPearceBooks.com. I invite you to join my mailing list, which I call the Eddie Grant Readers Group after the protagonist of my first two novels. You can subscribe on either of my sites and, of course, unsubscribe any time.
I hope you enjoy my books.
John Pearce
Sarasota, May 2018