Paris In the Dark

Nominated for the 2019 Hammett Prize

Autumn 1915. The First World War is raging across Europe. Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches, although that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher Marlowe 'Kit' Cobb, a Chicago reporter and undercover agent for the US government is in Paris when he meets an enigmatic nurse called Louise. Officially in the city for a story about American ambulance drivers, Cobb is grateful for the opportunity to get to know her but soon his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, extends his mission. Parisians are meeting 'death by dynamite' in a new campaign of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to discover who is behind this - possibly a German operative who has infiltrated with the waves of refugees? And so begins a pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits and talents for survival.

Fleetly plotted and engaging with political and cultural issues that resonate deeply today, Paris in the Dark is a page-turning novel of unmistakable literary quality.



Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.



Written in a hard-boiled, staccato style, Paris in the Dark is an intelligent, stylish thriller, and so atmospheric that the pages reek of Gitanes and coffee



'A morally complex and beautifully written thriller with a delicately portrayed love story at its heart. A cut above'



'A thriller of great depth and intelligence'



'A riveting thriller with impressively well-developed characters and such rich historical detail that is hard to put down'



As well as being a top thriller, Paris In The Dark oozes the atmosphere of the city at that time - you can almost smell the Gauloises, not to mention the tension and fear