MADRIGAL has St-Cyr and Kohler seconded to Avignon, where a young woman has been found dead in the Papal Palace (now the home of the Archbishop, the Pope having gone back to Rome six hundred years before). She is dressed in a medieval costume, her buttons embellished with secret signs, and her throat has been cut. The costume she made, the reason she was wearing it: to attend an audition for the local glee club. And the local glee club? Like most of the clergy it becomes clear, they are keen photographers and orgiasts, as well as hypocrites and perhaps blackmailers.
This is war-time, though, and the murder of Mireille de Sinety throws up far more. How can her possible boyfriends be chased when they are nowhere to be found as all are avoiding compulsory transfer to work in Germany? And with the cold winter of 1942/43 driving everyone onto the black market for essential food as well as the little extras a life needs, with whom else might Mireille have been forced to associate? Witnesses would be afraid enough to admit dealing with the ration-breakers, let alone with possible murderers so there is plenty in the contemporary events of the Occupation to make a detective's work ten-times harder.
Ultimately, St-Cyr traces things back to an older embargo. St-Cyr knows what psycho-tropics might do - Kohler is still damaged from his amphetamine-driven breakdown in an earlier book - and France had long before outlawed others. That, though, he discovers, has not destroyed the taste for absinthe. It is being smuggled in from Spain and Switzerland, and it is in the crazed rites of the absinthe drinkers that an older murder is revealed - an absinthe drinker who became a victim of her fellow imbibers.
MADRIGAL is ultimately a grotesque parody. However, given the way Janes writes this is not evident. It is something to be realised later when considering this dark period of human history. I have Janes' books from five publishers now - this will not be his breakthrough work, but those who already like him will not be disappointed.