The Little Fires
France, autumn 1940. A strange honeymoon is in place between Parisians and their German invaders. Soon the "lovable conquerors" will feel the sting of the resistance, but in the momentary lull Captain Martin Bora of German counterespionage travels to Paris with a curious charge: shadowing WWI hero and international literary star Ernst Jünger, a politically unorthodox soldier on an unofficial furlough. Matters tangle as Bora receives two separate sets of additional orders that involve a mysterious Pole, owner of a music shop, and especially "the ugly incident at Landerneau", a murder in faraway Brittany. Trailed by the SS, his Polish front nemesis, Bora travels to Finistère, where 60-foot ocean tides fringe a secretive hinterland, seething for independence. It is in this ancient region of pagan stone circles and Arthurian legends that Bora will pursue the foxfire of his threefold investigation. On his way to discover who killed the seemingly pious wife of a German commodore, he meets the modern equivalent of magicians and enchantresses, from a defrocked priest to a world-weary ballroom singer, from Celtic-speaking farmers to a haunted army general and a haunted house, bearing the ominous name of The Departed. Ernst Jüenger himself as an enigma, a friend and a foe at the same time...
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