Winner of the ELLE's Female Readers Prize 2008

One day, Alexander Astrid, an alcoholic cop, devastated by the death of his wife and two sons, receives a thick anonymous manuscript entitled “Garden Of Love” in the mail.

The story rings a bell. It is his own life he is reading about, dissected by a connoisseur whom Astrid recognizes rapidly as Ariel Dayms, principal suspect in a series of unsolved crimes.

A real Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dayms is Matthieu by day, Ariel by night. He seeks the woman who will evoke the dead sister he wasn’t able to save, and is ready to kill to fulfill this phantasm.

Astrid, distressed by the manuscript, attempts to interrogate Dayms but finds him dead, by suicide, in his house. Persuaded that the document is an ultimate act of revenge, he runs it by the only person who could help him: his sister-in-law, Marie.

This gripping and Machiavellian yet lyrical novel, begins like a traditional roman noir, sucking the reader into a kaleidoscope of characters and their destinies.

Three women, three men. Who is who? Who did what ? Where does fiction begin, and where does it end ?