IN THE MISTS OF EVIL
(to be published by Calman-Levy on October 19, 2016)

Tom’s mother is dead and Tom has gone missing. Not just Tom, but John, Michael and Lily too. In each case, a mother is murdered and her child disappears, apparently swallowed up by the sinister mists of South Carolina. Dahlia Rhymes, an FBI agent specialized in ritual crime, gatecrashes the investigation. Tom is her nephew and, despite severing all ties with her family, she feels she cannot abandon him. On returning to the swamps and ancient oaks of her childhood, Dahlia meets Nathan Miller, a former street kid who has become one of the best cops in Charleston. Together they begin looking for the missing children with just one lead : the testimony of a neighbor who claims to have seen a shadduh, a voodoo spirit, prowling around one of the houses. And what if, for once, the motive was neither money, nor sex, nor revenge, nor even love ?

In just two novels, René Manzor has emerged as one of the new names on the French thriller scene. His previous novel, Celui dont le nom n’est plus (He Whose Name Is No More) won the European Thriller Award at the Cognac Festival. With Dans les brumes du mal (In the Mists of Evil), he tells a finely-wrought tale set in the Low Country of South Carolina that he loves, powered by the style that characterizes him, rich in cruelty, finesse and emotion.