The Cavalier of the Apocalypse

In the icy winter of 1786, in the final years before the French Revolution, hunger, cold, and seething frustration with the iron grip of France's absolute monarchy drive poor and rich alike to outright defiance. Slums, fashionable caf s, and even aristocratic mansions echo with discontent and the first warning signals of the approaching turmoil of 1789.

Paris's cemeteries are foul and disease-ridden, but no one, including penniless writer Aristide Ravel, expects to find a man with his throat cut lying dead in a churchyard, surrounded by strange Masonic symbols. Already suspected of subversive activities, Ravel must now clear his name of murder. His search for answers amid the city's literary and intellectual demimonde-with the aid of friends who may not be all that they seem-leads him into a tangle of conspiracy, secret societies, royal scandal, and imminent revolution, which grows only more complex when the corpse disappears...

Susanne Alleyn has loved history all her life, aided and abetted by her grandmother, Lillie V. Albrecht, an author of historical children’s books in the 1950s and 60s. Susanne is the author of the Aristide Ravel historical mystery series, set in revolutionary Paris; A FAR BETTER REST, the reimagining of Dickens’s A TALE OF TWO CITIES; the nonfiction MEDIEVAL UNDERPANTS AND OTHER BLUNDERS: A WRITER’S (AND EDITOR’S) GUIDE TO KEEPING HISTORICAL FICTION FREE OF COMMON ANACHRONISMS, ERRORS, AND MYTHS; and A TALE OF TWO CITIES: A READER’S COMPANION, an annotated guide to the classic novel. Happy to describe herself as an ＂insufferable knowitall＂ about historical trivia (although she lost on Jeopardy!), Susanne has been writing about and researching eighteenth-century and revolutionary France for nearly three decades. She is currently working on the sequel to THE EXECUTIONER’S HEIR and various nonfiction projects.