Six Crimes Without a Murderer

A classic French puzzle mystery—featuring not 1 but 6 locked room murders—from the influential suspense writer who inspired Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

How can you catch a killer who doesn’t exist?

It seems like an impossible crime. A husband and wife shot by an intruder in their elegant Paris apartment, in full view of the crowds gathered on the street below. The apartment door is bolted from the inside. And now no murderer is in sight, though there was only one way out of the room.

The police are confounded. And Private Detective André Brunel, though he is convinced it is impossible, is on the case. Then more and more killings occur—6 in total—each time in a room with no possible means of escape. And each time, the devilish “phantom murderer” vanishes into thin air.

Brunel has never faced such an invisible adversary, but using his powers of implacable logic, he tracks the mysterious killer all across the luxurious streets of 20th century Paris, determined to unmask them.

A virtuosic locked-room mystery, Six Crimes Without a Murderer is an early novel by the French master of suspense Pierre Boileau. His famed collaboration with Thomas Narcejac produced masterpieces such as Vertigo and She Who Was No More, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho. Fans of Golden Age crime will adore this deadly and fast-paced puzzle mystery simmering with Hitchcockian tension and full of sharp twists and thrills that will keep readers’ hearts racing to the very last page.