Marie-Claire Bernard was the widow of a national hero and the daughter of a wealthy, politically powerful family and her murder threatened domestic consequences for the French Government. Eager to avoid uproar in the press, the Minister of Justice summons Gérard de Montclaire –the most renowned detective of the era—to assume a familiar role. Examining Magistrate, with sweeping powers to find and prosecute the killer.Montclaire soon learns that Marie-Claire was in possession of three rare and priceless porcelain bowls of the Tang Dynasty. The legendary bowls—called The Tears of Buddha — are now missing. A motive for murder? Soon, however, what seems to be a clear case of criminal murder and theft is overturned by developments that take Montclaire into the bizarre world of criminal syndicates, espionage, code-breaking and the German Kaiser's boundless ambitions and hatred of France. Following every thread of through a complicated skene of evidence and even surviving a...

An unbreakable cipher, a dead priest with expensive shoes, a hermit who has conversations with saints, an angry French girl, a guardian angel with attitude, a murderous master criminal, and a gaggle of angry demons might stop an ordinary fifteen-year-old safe-cracking genius, but not Percy St.-John.  He's out to prove he did not steal a mysterious ancient book that may hold the key to mankind's greatest hope and greatest danger. E.A. Allen is a History Professor, cattle farmer, and retired C.I.A. intelligence officer. When he's not out chasing straying cows that have no respect for fences, or tracking-down undergraduates who have no respect for assignment deadlines, he's at his desk, writing mysteries in the great tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers.