How do you catch a killer when there are no witnesses, no DNA and no apparent motive? A young Parisian academic is brutally murdered in the quiet streets of a small town in South West France. Former police detective Celestine Courbet, escaping with her partner Jacques Lecoubarry from tragedy and betrayal in Bordeaux, is reluctantly drawn into an increasingly dangerous investigation. The answers appear to lie in an eighty-year-old coded message left for the victim’s grandfather by a man in imminent peril from the Nazis. From the ancient cloisters of a 12th Century abbey to the ruins of a deserted village in the woods, Celestine follows the clues and places her and Jacques in increasing jeopardy from a powerful and ruthless killer. When a second brutal murder takes place they are forced to take even greater risks to decipher the code and to solve the murders. A gripping murder mystery that will enthrall the reader and keep them turning the pages to the very end.