Floats the Dark Shadows by Yves Fey

Welcome to the Book’s Delight and this stop on the Coffee Pot Book Tour for Floats the Dark Shadows by Yves Fey. We have a great excerpt for you, so grab a cup of something warm, slip into a comfy chair and get ready!

The Details

Book Title: Floats the Dark Shadow

Series: The Paris Trilogy

Author: Yves Fey

Publication Date: September 2022 (Second Edition)

Publisher: Tygerbright Press

Audiobook: narrated by Hollie Jackson

Page Length: 340 pages

Genre: Historical Mystery

Blurb:

Young American painter Theodora Faraday struggles to become an artist in Belle Époque Paris. She’s tasted the champagne of success, illustrating poems for the Revenants, a group of poets led by her adored cousin, Averill.

When children she knows vanish mysteriously, Theo confronts Inspecteur Michel Devaux who suspects the Revenants are involved. Theo refuses to believe the killer could be a friend—could be the man she loves. Classic detection and occult revelation lead Michel and Theo through the dark underbelly of Paris, from catacombs to asylums, to the obscene ritual of a Black Mass.

Following the maze of clues they discover the murderer believes he is the reincarnation of the most evil serial killer in the history of France—Gilles de Rais. Once Joan of Arc’s lieutenant, after her death he plunged into an orgy of evil. The Church burned him at the stake for heresy, sorcery, and the depraved murder of hundreds of peasant children.

Whether deranged mind or demonic passion incite him, the killer must be found before he strikes again.

The Excerpt:

Michel’s Past – Floats the Dark Shadow

Michel had been eighteen. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care. The Commune cast a long shadow and Michel had found its darkness brighter than the pallid light of everyday life. He’d still felt bound to the past, to the Communards he’d worshipped with a boy’s fervor. He’d still felt bound by blood to his cousin Luc, who had been the glowing symbol of that worship. Now Luc, hero of the Commune, had returned. Luc, who was dashing, articulate, brave—and utterly ruthless.

In 1883, Paris was again a shambles, the mammoth stock market crash only a year behind them. Wild speculation and borrowing had spiraled out of control. Banks all around France had collapsed and finally l’Union Générale floundered. The Catholic bank blamed its demise on the Jews and Freemasons, as if its own gluttonous greed, its falsified reports, had no bearing. France plummeted headlong into a recession that would last another decade. Guillame Devaux, brigadier of the Sûreté, had helped keep the peace in turbulent Paris. But keeping the peace meant oppressing the people. He’d spoken soberly of the perils of anarchy and warned of worse bloodshed, but the words Michel had once found wise constricted him like a straitjacket.

Defiant, he’d wanted words of passion, of rebellion. At her trial, the Commune’s great heroine, Louise Michel, had cried out, “You decree that any heart which beats for freedom has the right to nothing but a lump of lead. I now claim mine. Let me live and I will go on crying for revenge. I shall avenge my fallen brothers. If you have any courage, you will kill me!”

Twenty-five thousand Communards had died or been executed, but they had not given Louise Michel her lump of lead. She had been deported. Now, twelve years after the fall of the Commune, she’d returned to Paris, her fiery spirit unquenched. Continuing her fight against oppression, she’d led a huge demonstration at the Esplanade of Les Invalides. Afterwards, a huge crowd marched across Paris. Loaves of bread were looted from bakers' shops. Louise Michel was charged with instigating the looting. Ever fearless, she’d turned herself in to the police.

Montmartre was in an uproar. Their heroine was arrested because some tag-alongs had stolen bread. Who could blame them? They stole because they were starving! Anger simmered hotly under the cold, heavy lid of fear. Everyone believed the protesters would go to jail—or worse, be gunned down just as during the Commune. The cafés were filled with furious arguments and songs of revolution.

Michel had shared their zeal. He remembered sitting in Le Rat Mort on a cold, wet day, drinking red wine and feeling like a man. Surrounding him were tables filled with the glorious riffraff of Montmartre—musicians, artists, poets, radical journalists and even more radical anarchists. Craziness became the ultimate sanity, bourgeois sobriety the death of the spirit. Michel’s hair had grown long and shaggy. He tossed it out of his eyes as he quoted Kropotkin’s Anarchist Manifesto, “We demand bread for all, work for all, freedom and justice for all.”

That was when his cousin reappeared, sliding into the chair beside him. “For words such as those,” Luc said, “Kropotkin was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.”

He looked a little like Michel’s true father, with finer bones and a more olive coloring than Michel had inherited. Luc’s easy surface charm barely concealed an inner ferocity. Michel responded to both instantly. The past was not dead. It was alive, here, now, with this man. Michel had found his true family again.

Luc filled him brimful of tales of woe and triumph. He told Michel how he’d fought at Père Lachaise cemetery, the final bastion of the Communards. Michel envisioned the thick early morning fog that gave way to drizzling showers. He saw the cherry trees dripping rain like tears. Then the army blew open the gates and rushed upon them. The Communards fought hand to hand with the enemy amid the tombs. Most died in the battle. Those captured were lined up against a wall and shot. Luc claimed he was the fabled last man on the barricade, that he fired the last shot before he walked off into the mist. Paris wasn’t safe, so he took a new name and vanished.

“Where did you go?”

“Many places, Algeria, Madagascar, Dahomey. I was dealing guns two years ago in Abyssinia. I had a partner, but he took sick, Arthur Rimbaud.”

“The poet?”

Luc smiled. “A poet? Oh, I doubt that. Rimbaud was a cold-blooded, mercenary creature. He read nothing but books on engineering.”

Filled with hero worship, Michel believed him. Now he thought his cousin knew what stories would thrill him, as he had when Michel was a child. Of course, Luc told him stories about his parents, things he barely remembered, things he never knew. And, of course, they talked politics. The dream of anarchy—the triumph of the honest poor over the corrupt rich.

“What would be the perfect revolutionary act?” Luc asked him one day.

“For me? To rescue Louise Michel.”

Luc smiled. “And how would you achieve that?”

“She goes to trial in June.” Michel had fantasies, but he knew they were just that. “She will be heavily guarded.”

“In shackles.”

That stirred his anger. “We could organize—”

“—and be gunned down in the streets, as always.”

“A distraction then. A disruption.”

Luc waited.

“A bomb.” A spear of ice pierced Michel. He knew that Luc had led him to the idea.

“A bomb in the Palais de Justice.” Luc’s eyes glittered.

Michel hesitated. “An explosion to cause panic and in the chaos rescue Louise Michel?”

“Yes, of course.” Luc leaned closer. “And how would you do it? Do it and escape?”

They argued about various targets within the Palais de Justice and about the structure of the time bomb. Michel could visit his adoptive father at will. He could saunter off and explore various parts of the building. Luc suggested the Café Louis, where the lawyers gathered for lunch. Somehow, he even acquired an advocate’s robe. “I will walk unseen among them.” He laughed. Michel argued that an empty trial room would be the ideal target. But there were seldom empty rooms. Cases piled up endlessly. Reporters flocked the halls along with the accused and their lawyers.

Luc shrugged. “We can send a warning.”

“They would clear the building, but what if they searched for the bomb?”

“Stupidity can be fatal.”

Michel had imagined killing. In fantasy, he’d climbed the ramparts, fighting to the death and taking the enemy with him. But even at the height of his rebellion, he was by then enough Guillame Devaux’s son not to want to murder anyone. Perhaps Marcel Calais’s son had also seen enough horror. He’d watched his mother starve to death. He’d seen bloody, bloated corpses in the street, crawling with maggots. He’d seen his sister raped and bayoneted. The soldiers had threatened him with the same before Guillame Devaux entered the abandoned building and saved him.

He was also enough Guillame Devaux’s son to know of the million things that could go wrong when carrying out a crime.

Luc scoffed. “Do you think we’ll blow ourselves up? We are not idiots.”

The longer they talked, the more Michel resisted. The heroine of the Commune might be freed by a well-executed plan with many participants, but the most likely outcome would be slaughter in the streets. He felt both a coward and a fool when he expressed his doubt, but Luc only said, “I believe you are right. Rescue is impossible. Louise Michel might even refuse us. She is willing to be a martyr to the cause—to take that lump of lead into her heart.”

“You thought all along it was a crazy idea,” Michel accused.

Luc grinned at him. “I believe in crazy ideas. How else can I be an anarchist?”

Without his glorious plan, however futile, Michel felt bereft.

Leaning forward, Luc lowered his voice. “We cannot rescue Louise Michel, but nothing else needs change.”

It had all changed for Michel. For a second he felt only confusion, then a cold weight sank to the pit of his stomach. “The bomb.”

Luc’s smile was hard. “Propaganda by deed.”

Michel argued fiercely, “In Le Révolté Kropotkin says a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite.”

“A few kilos are a beginning. Wave after wave of us will crash down on them. In the end, we will obliterate them.”

“Or they us,” Michel said.

Finally, Luc just laughed at the idea of no one dying. “What does it matter? I will try to stay alive, but if I die killing them, I will become a martyr for those who follow.”

“Many are innocent,” Michel protested.

“There are no innocent bourgeois,” Luc said scornfully. Then, quoting Robespierre, “Pity is treason.”

“Robespierre was a monster.” Suddenly Michel was furious. “Pity is human.”

Buy Links:

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Audio: https://www.audible.com/pd/Floats-the-Dark-Shadow-Livre-Audio/B00IX13DGG

AppleBooks: https://books.apple.com/book/floats-the-dark-shadow/

Author Bio:

Yves Fey has MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and a BA in Pictorial Arts from UCLA. Yves began drawing as soon as she could hold a crayon and writing at twelve.

She’s been a tie dye artist, go-go dancer, creator of ceramic beasties, writing teacher, illustrator, and has won prizes for her chocolate desserts. Her current obsession is creating perfumes inspired by her Parisian characters.

Yves lives in Albany with her mystery writer husband and their cats, Charlotte and Emily, the Flying Bronte Sisters.