The Lost and the Damned

"The Lost and the Damned hits the ground running and never lets up . . . This impressive debut is slick, sick and not for the faint-hearted . . . It will make you cry out (for more)" - Mark Sanderson, The Times Crime Book of the Month

A suspenseful new police procedural from a former French police officer and one of the original writers on the hit series Spiral

A corpse that wakes up on the mortuary slab.

A case of spontaneous human combustion.

There is little by the way of violent crime and petty theft that Capitaine Victor Coste has not encountered in his fifteen years on the St Denis patch - but nothing like this.

Though each crime has a logical explanation, something unusual is afoot all the same, and Coste is about to be dragged out of his comfort zone. Anonymous letters addressed to him personally have begun to arrive, highlighting the fates of two women, invisible victims whose deaths were never explained. Just two more blurred faces among the ranks of the lost and the damned.

Olivier Norek's first novel draws on all his experience as a police officer in one of France's toughest suburbs - the same experience he drew on as a writer for the hit TV series Spiral.

Translated from the French by Nick Caistor