Martine LeDuc Series
Martine LeDuc is the director of tourism for the city of Montréal, Québec, and murder is very bad for her business! As her position that allows her to interact with pretty much everybody in the city, she is called upon to help politicians, the various police entities, academics, historians—and even her own husband, Ivan, who is the director of the Montréal Casino—especially when murders breach the peace.
In a city that speaks two official languages, is home to multiple distinct communities, and is a cosmopolitan business and tourism center, Martine must thread her way carefully to help Montréal maintain its status and flourish. Sometimes that involved uncovering old secrets that everyone would prefer to forget… but that may ultimately show the only way forward.
Asylum
Martine LeDuc is the PR director for Montreal, where four women have been murdered. Liasing with police lieutenant Julian Fletcher, she discovers that all the women were looking into Montreal’s past, when orphans were transferred to a psychiatric hospital and made the subjects of experimentation (drugs, electroshock, lobotomies) in collusion with the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.
All of the murdered women have a connection to these historic situations, and were killed to keep someone else’s role from becoming public. Martine finds herself standing between the killer—and his getting away with it all.
“De Beauvoir has delivered a harrowing, addictive read that will keep you up late into the night and your mind lingering long after you’ve closed the book. Asylum is riveting and disturbing, and charming amateur sleuth Martine LeDuc is an indomitable and courageous heroine you’ll be rooting for from page one.”
“Asylum really surprised me, it’s a real page-turner. I could’t put it down and read it in two days! Haven’t done that with a book in a long time! The novel is wonderfully crafted and written, its development is carefully and ingeniously layered. I hadn’t read mysteries or thrillers for a while, and Asylum is both. ”
Deadly Jewels
When Martine LeDuc, publicity director for the city of Montréal, is summoned into the mayor's office, she's pleasantly surprised to find the city is due for a PR coup: a doctoral researcher at McGill University claims to have found proof that the British crown jewels were stored in Montréal during WWII.
Martine is thrilled to be part of the excavation project, until it turns out that the dig's discoveries include the skeleton of a man with diamonds in his ribcage and a hole in his skull. Is this decades-old murder leading her too far into the dangerous world of Canada’s neo-Nazi networks, or is there something going on that makes the jewels themselves deadly? Is history ever really completely buried?
With pressing personal issues crowding into her professional life, Martine needs to solve not only the puzzle of the jewels, but some more recent crimes?including another murder, a kidnapping, and the operation of an ancient cult in Montréal?and do it before the past reaches out to silence her for good.
Great reviews from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, and more!
“…another riveting read from the pen of author Jeannette de Beauvoir and continues to demonstrate her total mastery of the mystery/suspense genre.”
“In Martine’s second outing, de Beauvoir transforms a historical tidbit (the shipping of British gold reserves and securities to Canada for safekeeping during World War II) into a fascinating premise; an absorbing endnote details the historical record. An intriguing choice.”
Trapped
When a boy's body is discovered in one of the tunnels under the streets of Montréal, publicity director Martine LeDuc teams up again with police lieutenant Julian Fletcher to solve the mystery.