Book review: Morts thématiques

Posted on March 14, 2026 by WordsAndPeace

Morts thématiques
(Une enquête du commandant Gaspard Cloux, Tome 1)
Literally: Thematic Deaths
– not yet available in English
by Éric Fouassier
Mystery
November 5, 2025 by Le Livre de Poche
274 pages
Received through Netgalley.fr

This is a bilingual review: first in French then in English.

Avant de voir le polar Morts thématiques offert sur Netgalley.fr, j’avoue n’avoir hélas jamais entendu parler de l’auteur Éric Fouassier. Quelle belle découverte !

Le corps d’un homme est retrouvé au Panthéon, devant le tombeau du célèbre mathématicien Lagrange. Un étrange poème, en réalité une énigme mathématique, est épinglé sur sa poitrine.

Before spotting the thriller Morts thématiques [litt. Thematic Murders] offered on Netgalley.fr, I have to admit I had never heard of the author Éric Fouassier. What a great discovery!

A man’s body is found at the Pantheon in Paris, outside the tomb of the famous mathematician Lagrange. A strange poem, actually a math puzzle, is pinned to his chest.

Click to continue reading

#ParisinJuly2025: recap and winners

Posted on August 2, 2025 by WordsAndPeace

Paris in July 2025
#ParisinJuly2025
(Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr)
Click on the logo to access all the links

Our #ParisinJuly2025 event is over!

It was a great success, with 27 participants (24 in 2024), we lost some older participants, but gained a bunch of new ones!
But only 94 posts (129 posts last year).

We had 63 book reviews (65 in 2024).
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris and A Bakery in Paris were reviewed by two of you.
We have two heros this year:
Antoine Laurain (as usual) but also Georges Simenon, with each 5 books reviewed.
Followed by Annie Ernaux and Patrick Modiano, with 2 books reviewed for each.
Lots of ideas of reading to keep you in France until next July!

Besides book reviews, we covered lots of themes (art, food, history, movies, music, sport, travels), including theater, a new one this year (thank you Emma!)
It’s also neat to have several of us combining #ParisinJuly with other memes, like Top Ten Tuesday for instance.

We didn’t have a Zoom meeting this year. No one showed interest, and I didn’t pursue it aggresively, as I had issues with my voice for most of the month.

As the organizer, I’m very surprised about a few things:

Several participants didn’t use MrLinky, but instead put the link to their post in a comment. Most memes, for instance the most popular Top Ten Tuesday, do use a MrLinky type system. And the MrLinky widget was almost at the top of the post, so not sure what’s going on here
Some bloggers still think it’s just about Paris, even though this event has been going on for years, and we have a very clear “mission statement” at the beginning of the post explaining what this event is all about
Some think I just started this, though it’s already the 3rd year I’ve taken over hosting this event which I think started in 2010.
Very few people entered the giveaways.
Only 1 participant posted her BINGO

So, do you suggest any improvement next year related to these points?

And now to our winners:
I will contact each shortly,
and will also forward your info to the publishers/authors.
Click on the covers to access the giveaway page.
There, if you click on the giveaway widget,
you will see the official widget winners displayed

Karen & Sharon

Anne & Diana

Diana & Jinjer

Anne

We have extra winners:
Marg, Lisbeth, and Fanda, for the most number of entries.
Ewa for the BINGO
Karen @ Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings:
random number generated – #6 (from the MrLinky list)

They will all received an ebook of their choice

Until next July in Paris!

Let me know in a comment
if there’s anything you think
should be edited or added
to make this event even better

Top Ten Books with Paris in the Title

Posted on July 22, 2025 by WordsAndPeace

Top Ten Books with Paris in the Title
TTT for July 22
#TopTenTuesday

📚 📚 📚

Today, we are supposed to feature books set in…
So in combination with #ParisinJuly2025, I’m choosing Paris, and Paris in the title to make it easy.
As I already featured most of the books I have read with Paris in the title, today I’m featuring the books currently in my TBR, with Paris in the title.
I will specify the date, genre, and the Goodreads synopsis.

Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, by Noël Riley Fitch (1983, nonfiction / history / biography)
The story of Sylvia Beach‘s love for Shakespeare and Company supplies the lifeblood of this book.
Paris au XXe siècle / Paris in the Twentieth Century, by Jules Verne
(1868 / published in 1994, scifi)
In 1863 Jules Verne, famed author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, wrote a novel that his literary agent deemed too far fetched to be published. More than one hundred years later, his great-grandson found the handwritten, never-before published manuscript in a safe. That manuscript was Paris in the Twentieth Century, and astonishingly prophetic view into the future by one of the most renowned science fiction writers of our time. . . .
Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co., by Jeremy Mercer (2005, nonfiction / books about books / memoir)
Wandering through Paris’s Left Bank one day, poor and unemployed, Canadian reporter Jeremy Mercer ducked into a little bookstore called Shakespeare & Co. Mercer bought a book, and the staff invited him up for tea. Within weeks, he was living above the store, working for the proprietor, George Whitman, patron saint of the city’s down-and-out writers, and immersing himself in the love affairs and low-down watering holes of the shop’s makeshift staff. Time Was Soft There is the story of a journey down a literary rabbit hole in the shadow of Notre Dame, to a place where a hidden bohemia still thrives.
Paris, by Julien Green (1983, nonfiction / travel)
Born an American in Paris in 1900, Green accompanies the reader on an imaginative stroll through the French capital sharing his discoveries at every turn. From haunted visions of Notre Dame to memories of the old Trocadero, Green lovingly describes these strange and often little known locations.
La Balle du néant (Les futurs mystères de Paris #1), by Roland C. Wagner (1996, scifi) Available also Italian, but not in English
Paris, 2063. Half a century after the “Primitive Great Terror” that shook the foundations of society (for the better rather than the worse), here is the first of the FUTURE MYSTERIES OF PARIS. In which we investigate the locked-room murder of a physicist.
We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories, by Ray Bradbury (2009, scifi short stories)
Get ready to travel far and wide once again with America’s preeminent storyteller. His tales will live forever. We will always have Bradbury—and for that reason, we are eternally blessed.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, by Paul Gallico (1958, historical fiction / humor)
Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, when tidying Lady Dant’s wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life – a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she’s never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she’s never wanted anything as much before. Determined to make her dream come true, Mrs Harris scrimps, saves and slaves away until one day, after three long, uncomplaining years, she finally has enough money to go to Paris. When she arrives at the House of Dior, Mrs Harris has little idea of how her life is about to be turned upside down and how many other lives she will transform forever.
The Silent Traveller in Paris, by Chiang Yee (1956, nonfiction)
By a Chinese who somehow penetrates the essential underlying qualities of the cities he visits. His is no routine tourist survey. Rather does he give the reader a acuse of wandering the byways, seeing the unusual, interpreting what he sees in terms is lative to his Chinese background. To Paris- thrice visited but never savoured — he comes in Winter, so as to let the famed Spring find him prepared, sensitized, understanding. From arroundissement to arroundissment he wanders; he seeks out the unheralded, the little streets, and the steliers of artists and craftsmen, the clubs and haunts of the existentialists, the tiny parks and gardens.
Paris ne finit jamais / Paris no se acaba nunca / Never Any End to Paris,
by Enrique Vila-Matas (2003, literary fiction)
A splendid ironic portrayal of literary Paris and of a young writer’s struggles by one of Spain’s most eminent authors. This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the part literature plays in our lives.
Métronome : L’histoire de France au rythme du métro parisien / Metronome: A History of Paris from the Underground Up, by Lorànt Deutsch
(2009, nonfiction / history)
Did you know that the last Gallic warriors massacred by the Romans lie beneath the Eiffel Tower? That the remains of Paris’s first cathedral are under a parking lot in the Fifth District? Metronome follows Lorànt Deutsch, historian and lifelong Francophile, as he goes on a compelling journey through the ages, treating readers to Paris as they’ve never seen it before. Using twenty-one stops of the subway system as focal points-one per century-Deutsch shows, from the underground up, the unique, often violent, and always striking events that shaped one of the world’s most romanticized cities. Readers will find out which streets are hiding incredible historical treasures in plain sight; peer into forgotten nooks and crannies of the City of Lights and learn what used to be there; and discover that, however deeply buried, something always remains.