CAROUSEL

A strangled young woman, her room awash in blood, is only the beginning of the horrors that await SñretÇ Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr and his Gestapo watchdog Hermann Kohler (Mirage). Christianne Baudelaire, who was raped after death, is surrounded by two dozen forged Roman coins—one of them pressed into her forehead—and has a rubber-banded stuffed canary in her dresser drawer. Outside, there are two more corpses—those of a carousel operator roped to his own contraption, and a Gestapo corporal whose murder requires the taking of 30 hostages who'll be killed unless Louis and Hermann can follow a twisted trail of prostitution, collaboration, and family treachery reaching back 30 years. The mystery is ladled on generously—but Janes's perverse talent for mangling even the simplest expository scenes will discourage all but the hardiest fans of WW II intrigue.