Items filtered by date: March 2026

The last thing Voltaire or Émilie du Châtelet wanted to see at Cirey in the remote Champagne countryside was a uniform—let alone that of a private in the Maréchaussée, France’s military police corps. But that’s just what Voltaire had to face one morning in 1735, after a young man was shot dead in the Cirey forest. Research at Cirey itself, in the Musée de la Gendarmerie at Melun and on sites like imagesdesoldats.fr gave me a picture of what Voltaire saw as he strode across Émilie’s courtyard to confront Cavalier Victor Constant, the military policeman who made it his duty to solve the murder. While Murder at Cirey is on preorder at Amazon, I'd like to help you see Victor ride into action.

Sapere Books UK are releasing the Victor Constant Investigations series in June this year and the first title is on preorder at Amazon here. I am delivering the fourth in the series to Sapere this month. During an intimate conversation in that novel, a passionate young artist confesses that amongst the art works in Rome she can think of only one likeness of Victor's mouth, in a representation of the Emperor Lucius Verus. The head shown here is held in the Bardo Museum in Turin. I agree with her but only the upper lip is accurate, and to see the rest of the face you'd need to read the novel, which will also be out this year.

Sapere Books let me know today that their Kindle edition of Murder at Cirey, the first in the Victor Constant Investigation Series, is now on preorder from Amazon. This is a great thrill and I'm very pleased to have Peter Lovesey's generous phrase at the top of the cover and a genuine, contemporary map of Victor's territory at the bottom. The Jack Reacher of the eighteenth-century (as one reader would have it) deserves no less.