Amazon.com Review
"In spite of the war and the conqueror-conquered relationship, they had got on since the fall of 1940. Two detectives of long standing. None of the Gestapo-SS brutality and sadism for them. Just robbery, arson, murder, extortion, other things also, and much trouble with the SS and the Gestapo. These days so many got in the way." Among the people getting in the way of Inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French Surete and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo in this fourth installment of Canadian author J. Robert Janes's memorable series is top Nazi Hermann Goering. Goering's in Paris on an art-looting mission that crosses paths with an investigation by Kohler and St-Cyr into the murders of several young women who answered an ad to become fashion models. Ghosts of wars past and present haunt the story: one of the suspects is a "drooler," an aristocrat badly mutilated in World War One; and Kohler's two sons are involved in the ongoing siege of Stalingrad.
It's impossible to praise too highly the subtle ways in which Janes shows the twisted idiocy of the times through the lives of his two cops. St-Cyr (his family destroyed in a bomb blast) lives with a singer who has Resistance ties. But this most patriotic of Frenchmen faces death from a strengthened Resistance because of his perceived collaboration with the German occupiers. Kohler supports and protects two French women, and thereby puts them in danger. Always at odds with his Gestapo superiors, Kohler also needs their help in his investigations. When he faces down Goering at an art auction, it seems as much an act of suicidal madness as one of moral strength.
Mannequin begins just as the equally impressive Salamander ends. Along with Sandman and Stonekiller, they form a quartet as resonant as any ever written about a world at war. --Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
Janes, a Canadian author, pens the remarkable 1940s series featuring Jean-Louis St.-Cyr of the Parisian Surete and Hermann Kohler, reluctantly of the Gestapo, whose joint efforts in occupied Paris during WWII have been chronicled in the admirable tales, Stonekiller, Sandman and Salamander. Equally compelling is the latest outing for this unlikely pair of criminal investigators, who continually grouse at each other but respect their mutual professionalism. Joanne Labelle, a pretty young neighbor of St-Cyr's, answered a newspaper ad for a model, or mannequin, and then disappeared. Four days later, coinciding with a robbery at a nearby bank, the two investigators find photos of Joanne and many other young women, naked and fearful, in a house near the Palais Royal. Bodies of the other girls are found, mutilated and brutally slain. St. Cyr and Kohler begin a particularly grim search that leads through the Parisian underworld into the twilight zone of wealthy and fashionable collaborators with the Nazis and, ultimately, to an art auction at which the star guest is Hermann Goring himself. As the two cases converge, Janes offers, in hundreds of authentic details, a searing picture of the misery, frequent opportunism and shifty uncertainties of the German occupation and, in his two protagonists, a believable bonding of improbable allies. The wind-up is genuinely spine-crawling.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
