Autorentext

Julien St. James writes atmospheric crime and cross-cultural fiction about belonging, obsession, and the bargains we make with tradition. His work moves easily across borders - a habit, perhaps, of a life that never stayed in one place for long.Born in London and raised across four continents, he has lived and worked in the Netherlands and Sweden - the countries that shaped much of his crime writing - and on all four sides of the United States: Virginia in the east, Minnesota in the north, California in the west, and Texas in the south, where he has been based in Austin since 2015. That restless geography runs straight through his fiction: his debut, Perfect Attachment (2025), is a Nordic noir set in Sweden; Love Notes and Sticky Tape (2025) is a love story set in Japan; and The Tenth Car unfolds across the United Kingdom and France, following a reluctantly retired detective into a rarefied world where a handful of people decide what is real.He came to writing crime the way most people come to it - by reading a great deal of it, and then a great deal more. His shelves run to more than two hundred authors, from the golden-age puzzles of Agatha Christie to the cold spycraft of Len Deighton, the atmospheric British crime of Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves, and the patient procedurals of Michael Connelly. Influenced above all by Jo Nesbø and Jan Willem van de Wetering, he is drawn to the unshowy end of the genre: the patient investigator, the slow accumulation of detail, the moment a small human gesture gives everything away. He is interested less in who did it than in why - in the desires, loyalties, and inherited stories that lead ordinary people to extraordinary deceptions.

Klappentext

A lost masterpiece. The world's leading expert says it is real. And eighteen million pounds say someone is lying. When a struggling hedge-fund manager finds a pre-war Delacroix, one of only ten ever built and missing since 1940, sealed in the carriage house of his crumbling Cornish estate, it looks like salvation. The world's foremost authority authenticates it. A collector pays eighteen million pounds. Weeks later, a rival expert calls it a fake. Omus Jones is lately of the Avon and Somerset police and five months into the private investigation business he runs from a damp office on the Bristol harbourside, with a broken espresso machine and a tin of anchovies for company. His client, an insurer facing a ruinous claim, wants a single answer. Is the seller a fraud, or a victim? What Omus finds is a deception seventy years in the making. A forgery so beautiful it almost deserves to be real. And an expert whose sharpest weapon is the one thing nobody thinks to question: his authority. Paired with the precise and unsentimental DS Zennor Quince, Omus follows a paper trail from a Devon workshop to a flat in Paris, and learns that the most dangerous lies are the ones people tell themselves. The Tenth Car is a witty, intricate, fair-play mystery, the first to feature private investigator Omus Jones. For readers who love the wit and ingenuity of Anthony Horowitz, Richard Osman, Elly Griffiths, and Janice Hallett.