When the Louvre in Paris opens its doors on 22 August 1911, a painting is missing from the Salon Carré: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The prefect of police immediately puts his men on high alert, shutting down streets, train stations and even harbors. But it’s too late. “La Joconde” is gone. It’s up to Juhel Lenoir of the Paris police to find it – and the whole world is watching …
Commissaire Lenoir is given the most difficult assignment he can imagine: to find the painting that has bewitched the world. On his hunt, the investigator encounters the painter Pablo Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the dancer Isabella Duncan and her guru, the Satanist Aleister Crowley; the brutal anarchists of the Bonnot Gang; and France’s greatest detective, Alphonse Bertillon, the “living Sherlock Holmes.” Who of them is embroiled in the story of the missing painting?
The search for the Mona Lisa takes Lenoir through the Paris of the late Belle Epoque, through artists’ cafés on Montmartre, to the Opéra Garnier, to decadent grandes fêtes in the Bois de Boulogne and to absinthe-soaked speakeasies on Place Pigalle. This historical novel is both a detective story and a portrait of an era when Paris was the center of the world.
