Commandant Servaz Series

"In a snowbound valley, deep in the French Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylum's director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing from within the fortified institution while someone seems to be slipping out at night. Commandant Martin Servaz, a charismatic, Toulouse city cop fond of quoting Latin, can't believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor who is accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the corpse... and a few days later the first human murder takes place. Servaz and his colleague, the mysterious Irene Ziegler, must use all their skill to solve the terrifying mystery"--

Night

by Bernard Minier

Published 7 February 2019

The No.1 bestseller in France, NIGHT is the thrilling new novel from award-winner Bernard Minier. The Commandant Servaz series The Frozen Dead is available now on Netflix.

'Like Agent Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs . . . Minier's killer is every bit as compelling.'

A woman murdered in a church in Norway.
A collection of photographs on an oil rig in the North Sea.
A young boy in a picturesque Austrian village.
The three clues that suggest a serial killer has returned . . .

Detective Kirsten Nigaard believes the signs point to none other than Julian Hirtmann, a serial murderer on the run. She turns to Toulouse cop Martin Servaz, who has a painful personal history with Hirtmann. Servaz hunted the elusive killer for many years until the trail went cold. Now they have a chance to bring him to justice at last.

But soon the pair find themselves in a terrifying cat-and-mouse chase, not knowing who is chasing whom, and which of them might pay the ultimate price.

Praise for Bernard Minier

'Over the past few years, France has produced some of Europe's most striking and original crime novelists. Bernard Minier is up there with the best' - The Sunday Times

'A super-accelerated version of a Hitchcock thriller, with thrills and shocks on nearly every page . . . Minier reels out lurid, quick and dirty prose, dirty enough to blacken the fingers as we read' - Spectator

Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

Published 3 November 2016

"You did nothing."

Christine Steinmeyer knows the suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve has nothing to do with her. But the man calling in to her radio show seems convinced otherwise.

"You let her die..."

That's only the beginning. Bit by bit, her life is turned upside down. But who among her friends and family hates her enough to want to destroy her? And why?

Commandant Martin Servaz is on leave when he is sent a key card to a hotel room - the room where an artist committed suicide a year earlier. He soon uncovers evidence of a truly terrifying crime. Could someone really be cruelly, consciously hounding women to death?

Both he and Christine will find out...but it may not be in time.

A Song for Drowned Souls

by Bernard Minier

Published 2 July 2015

They find the boy by the swimming pool, dolls floating on its surface.
Inside the house, his teacher lies dead.
But he claims to remember nothing...

Marsac is a quiet town in the Pyrenees, best known for its elite university. But when one of its professors is murdered, it becomes clear that the tranquil surface is a lie.

The chief suspect is the son of Commandant Servaz's university sweetheart; and when she implores him to investigate, he cannot refuse.

To close the case, Servaz must delve into his own past and re-open old and terrible wounds. It will be his most dangerous - and his most personal - investigation yet.

A Song for Drowned Souls is the new novel by international bestseller Bernard Minier, author of The Frozen Dead, which was selected by The Sunday Times as one of the best crime novels in recent years.