A novel by the modern French writer Fred Vargas, author of detective stories.
In the morning, singer Sofia Simeonidis sees a tree in her garden that she hadn’t seen the day before. Look—there it is. And in the house across the way, a neglected shack (by Paris standards: four floors with an attic and a garden, although there’s a toilet in the yard), three fairly young people—three unsuccessful historians—are settling in. A few weeks later, Sofia disappears, and a corpse is found…