NIGHT OF ASHES

XAVIER BOISSEL

Three destinies, three clandestines, three mysteries...

Paris, January 1974. While a storm is raging in Western Europe, the Parisian judiciary police discover the body of a man on the interchange at Porte de Bagnolet. The victim is a Maoist student from a good family, who has been tortured and mutilated.The investigation is entrusted to Detective Eperlan. It will lead him from a luxurious villa in Le Vésinet,to the gambling circles of the capital, and the campus of Vincennes, a hotspot for leftism. A young woman soon appears in the wake of the corpse: the enigmatic Alexia Zorn, who has just fled Paris followed closely by two underworld killers. From bus to hitchhiking, with a Browning and a bag full of money, she reaches the Cévennes. Lost in the middle of the mountains, she tries to lie low, with an old
gruff peasant as company. In this snowy landscape lurks the menacing Müll, a man from the Service d'Action Civique, who has just returned from Morocco with a load of cocaine. These three fates are inexorably intertwined. For Eperlan, the question is how. And for how long.

- A little-known period and subject: the creation of the SAC and its links with the mob.

Born in Lille in 1967, Xavier Boissel is passionate about history. He is now a French teacher in Clichy. Interested in the worlds of sociology as well as genre novels, he has collaborated on many works published by the Inculte collective.