Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade (UK 2017)

From the Publisher:
The second case for 'The Pinkerton Pair': Phil Beaumont, the laconic professional ("Are all the Pinkertons as good looking as you are?" "All of them," I said. "It's a requirement.") and the innocent, but far from naïve Jane Turner who is keen to earn her spurs with the famous detective agency ("I am not only a femme fatale, I am also a Pinkerton.")

The pair are employed to investigate the death of rich American publisher Richard Forsythe, supposedly killed as part of a suicide pact with his German lover in his Paris apartment. As Jane Turner travels undercover as a governess with members of the family across France, Beaumont is plunged into the heady world of 1923 Parisian society and underworld, literally, from the elegant cafes down into its sewers and catacombs. It is a world populated by famous and often dangerous eccentrics, including the socially inept and fantastically clumsy Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Sybil Norton - an English detective novelist famous for her book The Mysterious Affair at Pyles - and Henri Ledoq, a French policeman with more interest in fine wines and gourmet dining than in detection.

First UK publication.

Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade. Ostara Publishing, ISBN: 9791909619516 (October, 2017), 216 p., £12.99, eBook £5.94.

Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
In an elegant Paris hotel room, the carpet was white, the bed covers white, and the blood of dilettante Richard Forsythe and his German mistress a ghastly touch of red. Noting the lingering traces of lovemaking and the door bolted from within, the police ruled the shootings a romantic suicide pact. But Phil Beaumont, rugged Pinkerton agent, and Jane Turner, novice "op" disguised as a nanny, were looking for evidence of murder.

Now, from the famous sewers of Paris to its gilded salons, Phil and Jane enter a decadent world that is more dizzying than champagne, more dangerous than cocaine. And among the Lost Generation -- jazz singers, artists, Hemingway, Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, and Gertrude Stein -- they begin to unmask the secrets of sex and politics that lead to despair, desperate acts... and perhaps their own demise.

Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade. St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312969899 (May, 1999), 324 p., $5.99.

Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade (USA 1998)

From the Publisher:
In the sequel to Escapade, it's 1923, and it's Paris. The city has become a mecca for the world's painters and writers, and the Lost Generation is just beginning to find itself. Phil Beaumont, the resourceful Pinkerton, and Jane Turner, now a Pinkerton 'op' undercover as a governess, are investigating the death of Richard Forsythe, a rich American publisher. The Paris police say it was a suicide pact - Forsythe and his German mistress, Sabine, were found dead in a locked room - but they're not revealing everything they know. In their search for the truth, Phil and Jane move from saloon to salon, from the sewers and catacombs of the city to elegant cafes and night spots. Along the way, they meet local expatriate luminaries like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, as well as a young Englishwoman who writes mystery novels and a stolid, pipe-smoking French police inspector who knows a great recipe for coq au vin. Their own relationship grows stronger, but they find it, and themselves, in peril as they learn more about the mysterious Forsythe and the even more mysterious Sabine. Dark forces are aligned against them, enemies are closing in from all sides, and it looks as though they may never leave the City of Lights alive.

Walter Satterthwait: Masquerade. St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312186290 (July, 1998), 257 p., $22.95.