Something has got Aurel Timescu’s attention: an unsolved and apparently unsolvable crime. A vacationer has been found hanged. And it is a crime that will go unpunished if Aurel isn’t ready for the fight of his life.

Aurel Timescu’s French is tinged with a Romanian accent, he has the disheveled air of a character from between the wars, and a past as a performer in piano bars. Nobody can quite understand how he got to be Consul. Now, he’s taken a position in French Guinea—what a place for a man who says he can’t stand the heat! He passes his time perspiring, drinking gallons of Tokay, and composing librettos. 

Until, that is, a vacationer is found hanging from the mast of a sailboat. How did he end up dead, on a mast, on Aurel Timescu’s watch? Had his personal life been hanging by a thread? Was he hanging around waiting for love to be reciprocated? Had he been hanging out with the wrong crowd? Had he hung his hat on the peg of some quixotic dream? 

Prize-winning and best-selling author, and a former diplomat, Jean-Christophe Rufin brings Aurel to vivid life in this entertaining and gripping story.

★ “Readers will be reminded of Georges Simenon, only better.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Jean-Christophe Rufin
Jean-Christophe Rufin is one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and a former Ambassador of France in Senegal. He has written numerous bestsellers, including The Abyssinian, for which he won the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel in 1997. He also won the Goncourt Prize in 2001 for Brazil Red. His novels include The Red Collar (Europa, 2015), Checkpoint (Europa, 2017) and The Dream Maker (Europa, 2017).

• Jan 4 2022
  “A gem of a diplomatic thriller.”
  — Publishers Weekly
• Dec 23 2021
  “Rufin, a prizewinning novelist, appears to draw on his own diplomatic past in depicting the dislocation and isolation Aurel feels...”
  — The New York Times