The Hunting Ground

In the wake of World War II, a Frenchwoman learns to live for vengeance
In Zurich, a frail young woman sits down in a café. On her arm is a tattooed number—a souvenir from her time in Bergen-Belsen. As far as the French government is concerned, she is a dead woman, a casualty of the concentration camps. But after a narrow escape, Lily de St-Germain is back, and ready to take revenge on everyone who buried her. When the war started, Lily fled the countryside for Paris, hoping to convince her husband to abandon his work at the Louvre and help get their children to safety in England. There she found him in the arms of her sister, a betrayal that pushed her into the ranks of the Résistance—that fearful band of partisans who taught her to kill, and forced her to survive. The war may end in 1945, but Lily’s battle will have only just begun.

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he started writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series. In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The thirteenth in the series, Bellringer, was published in 2012.