The Hanged Man: A Mystery in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Set in 1890, Inbinder’s talky follow-up to 2014’s The Devil in Montmatre takes Insp. Achille Lefebvre to a crime scene in Paris’s Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Hanging from the park’s so-called suicide bridge is a man with a Biblical verse about Judas’s betrayal and suicide, written in Cyrillic, pinned to his jacket. Achille learns from a Russian acquaintance of his, who translates the note, that the victim is a Russian emigrant involved in anarchist circles. Determining that the death is murder rather than suicide, Achille deploys a network of spies and informers from Paris’s underworld and works uneasily with an unreliable former colleague, now in the political division of the Paris police force, to uncover the violent terrorist network of which the murder is only an offshoot. Intriguing period details and personalities, notably the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, enrich the plot. Unfortunately, Inbinder reveals the hanging’s perpetrators early on and elucidates most plot points through explanation rather than dramatization. As a result, both the investigation and the conspiracy lack suspense. [em]Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip Spitzer Agency. (Aug.) [/em]