The Three Evangelists

Description

Winner of the inaugural 2006 International CWA Dagger Award. The opera singer Sophia Simeonidis wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. Intrigued and unnerved, she turns to her neighbours- Vandoosler, an ex-cop, and three impecunious historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists. They agree to dig around the tree and see if something has been buried there. They find nothing but soil. A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend, her niece? They all seem to have a motive. Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth.

Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. A historian and archaeologist by profession, she is now a bestselling novelist. Her books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 45 languages.

The Three Evangelists is a strange mix of the sinister, the bizarre and the surreal; her characters seldom behave like ordinary people, and her mysteries do not follow the usual rules of crime fiction. Yet these curiously assembled elements coalesce into a gripping, unsettling whole that stays in the mind far longer than most novels of the genre. It tantalises from page one -- Marcel Berlins * The Times * A Vargas novel is as good as a trip to Paris. The style has the same hyper-real quality as all her writing - the real world, but filtered through a strange prism - but it's the plotting that really hits the spot: ingenious and eccentric -- Barry Forshaw * Daily Express * A truly original talent, creating situations and characters like nothing else in contemporary crime fiction... This novel is a delight, written in a wonderfully wry tone of voice, and its plot twists will defy the most alert reader -- Joan Taylor * Sunday Times * One of France's most original crime writers... her characters are eccentric but appealing and the mystery is enjoyably hard to solve * Sunday Telegraph * Original...plenty to enjoy * Times Literary Supplement *