Looking to the Woods

When a ten-year-old girl’s mutilated body is found in a public park in Paris, chief of police Nico Sirsky takes action. But his elite team of homicide detectives isn’t on the case for even twenty-four hours before a second child is found murdered and left to rot inside a middle-school classroom. With the City of Light on edge awaiting another gruesome discovery, the clock starts ticking for Sirsky to catch the elusive killer who calls himself the gamemaster.

As the pressure mounts, Sirsky is also confronted with a conundrum in his personal life: his girlfriend is inexplicably pulling away from him. But he must once again put his own problems aside when the investigation turns up nothing but taunts from the killer. It will take an entire team of police psychologists, forensic specialists, and criminal investigators to uncover the truth hidden in a web of murder more tangled than any of them could have imagined.

Writing has always been a passion for Frédérique Molay, author of the award-winning, internationally bestselling Paris Homicide series. She graduated from France’s prestigious Sciences Po and began her career in politics and French government administration. She worked as chief of staff for the French National Assembly and then worked for the local government in Burgundy, ran in the European elections, and was elected in Saône-et-Loire.

Meanwhile, she spent her nights pursuing a passion for writing she’d nourished since she wrote her first novel at the age of eleven. At the height of her brilliant political career, Molay won France’s prestigious crime fiction award, the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres, for The 7th Woman. She took a break from politics to continue the series and raise her three children.

Looking to the Woods is the fourth book in the Paris Homicide mystery series, featuring chief of police Nico Sirsky. Molay is currently at work on the fifth. Her passion for her career never left her, so she returned to politics as chief of staff for a senator. She now splits her time between Paris and Burgundy, between police procedurals and politics.

Anne Trager loves France so much she has lived there for more than a quarter of a century and just can’t seem to leave. What keeps her there is a uniquely French mix of pleasure seeking and creativity. After many years working in translation, publishing, and communications, she woke up one morning and said, “I just can’t stand it anymore. There are way too many good books being written in France not reaching a broader audience.” That’s when she founded Le French Book in order to translate and publish some of those works in English. The company’s motto is “If we love it, we translate it,” and Trager loves crime fiction, mysteries, and detective novels.