The Little Parachute

In 1943 occupied France, French villagers, officials, and operatives are caught in a cat-and-mouse game. Their survival may depend on the cunning and courage of a mute ten-year-old boy. Occupied France is a place of danger and duplicity; of survival and betrayal; of the double and triple cross. Martin, a ten-year-old English boy, rendered speechless after the trauma of the 1940 Blitzkrieg, travels from the countryside to see a specialist in Paris, accompanied by his purported mother, Angélique Bellecour, in reality his missing father's mistress. Two SS officers, the unspeakably cruel Kraus and his conflicted superior Dirksen, suspect them of being couriers for the underground and detain them for questioning, where they are privy to the fatal techniques used on other detainees. The SS suspicions are further aroused when Martin's enigmatic parachute drawing is discovered. The question arises whether it signals the arrival of an agent sent to rally the resistance and thwart German plans to bomb London from a site within France. And so begins the game. Who is watching the watchers? Who is complicit? Who, if anyone, can be trusted? J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author started he began writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series. In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author's attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The sixteenth in the series, Clandestine, was published in 2015.