La Récolte des enfants (The Harvest of Children)

“When do you stop being a child?”

After the events of The Greek Wall, Agent Evangelos has retired. His daughter Andromède invites him to spend Christmas in Zurich, where she has lived for twelve years with her husband and their child, Zoì, born during The Greek Wall and now fifteen.

The family will be moving back to Greece, so Andromède asks Evangelos to drive her luxury car to Athens. As he drives through Italy, then Albania, the news breaks that his granddaughter has disappeared. The ex-cop’s journey becomes a road trip in search of her, and he has to untangle two leads: that of a child killer, and that of jihadists in the making.

In The Harvest of Children, Nicolas Verdan combines the pace and twists of the thriller with the themes of the “roman noir”.