Beyond Revanche

Governments send citizens to war under banners of noble purpose: defending a smaller nation, democracy and justice. Beneath those slogans lie slaughter, misery, hunger and death, and the fortunes of those who profit from them. Beyond Revanche examines the injustice of a world war from the inside, following a small group of French policemen in the Deuxième Bureau as they confront the ruin that war brings.

Stretched to their limits, the investigators try to determine who is really directing the conflict in France and beyond. The conspiracy they uncover puts their own lives, and the future of France, at risk. In Paris, politics, injustice, sacrifice, murder and violence play out along the grand boulevards, and the rantings of a madman cast the city's events and its divided politics in a different light.

Written at a brisk pace, the novel should hold readers new to the way Paris was exposed to capitulation in the war's first weeks as well as those already familiar with that period. The complicity of wealthy, powerful men who shaped the disaster for their own gain is hard to believe. Two strands drive the story: a young detective trying to win acceptance, and an assassin being trained to carry out the final 'necessary' crime before war is declared in 1914.

The four years that follow reveal a truth that has long been buried.