I’ve been a fan of Janice Law’s series imagining the painter Francis Bacon as an amateur sleuth. This is the young Francis, long before he became established as a painter of graphic and often disturbing art. This Francis lives by his wits and by attaching himself as a young lover to well-heeled older men.

In Afternoons in Paris, it’s the late 1920s and Francis has fled to Paris after getting into trouble in Berlin, mostly because of his con man Uncle Lastings and members of the fledgling Nazi party. Now Francis is living in a tiny room, working as an artist’s assistant and learning as much as he can about painting technique and style and the Parisian art scene.

Francis has a bad habit of stumbling into murders and it happens again in this book, when an evening walk with a Russian acquaintance turns into an assassination of another Russian. Francis flees for his life and must lie low when it seems that a whole group of Russians is after him.

When Francis takes a job on the tech crew of an avant-garde theater troupe, the Russian element pops up again, in the form of Inessa, a young actress new to the troupe, and her thuggish “brother” and supposed protector, Alexi. Francis finds that Uncle Lastings has also taken refuge in Paris, under a new identity, where he is still on the fiddle, this time as a purveyor of fake antiques.

Though he ought to know better, Francis can’t resist trying to find out more about the various Russians he’s encountered, and about his Uncle Lastings’s new business. Next thing you know, Francis is up to his neck in trouble with a whole lot of Russians.

The good thing about this series is that you can read the books in any order. Still, I would recommend the first, Fires of London, not because it’s the first, but because it’s the most vivid and gripping. This particular entry in the series is less propulsive, takes awhile to find its feet, and when it does the plot is kind of confusing. It’s worth reading if the subject interests you, but it’s not the strongest book in the series. Note that although there are fairly frequent references to Francis’s sex life, there are no descriptions of sex acts.