Two brilliant and passionate love triangles are formed at L’Ecole Normale Superieure, ENS, Paris, the elite college where in the 1920s, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus celebrated their infamously complex affairs, and inspired their 21st century reincarnations: Sophie from an impoverished background in Algeria, wealthy Jean-Jacques and techie Christophe.

Exploring the City of Light, from Sacré Coeur to Note Dame to Montparnasse, nurturing their exquisitely intense and joyous relationships, surely these new intellectual giants cannot fail to change the world’s orbit.

Ten years later Sophie returns to Paris, hurt and angry. Now with unlimited resources, she will have her revenge. Her lover Jean-Jacques and his class must be humiliated, brought down. She will bring justice to the oppressed by punishing the privileged elite in a remorseless and bloody chess game, in which the pieces are individuals of inherited wealth and position.

At every move, in Winchester, London, Bath, Oxford, Southampton and Windsor, Jean-Jacques and his security team (and the reader too) are given the chance to solve a fiendish puzzle against the clock and save Sophie’s targets from their fate. In the tradition of the detective story, all the clues are there but can we trace Sophie’s thought-processes, solve her complex clues and answer her mathematical riddles?

With technical expert Chris’s support, Jack feels the burden of protecting centuries-old traditions, an honourable status quo, and his family’s fortune. As the terrible denouement approaches, the genders collide in an emotional maelstrom and society trembles on the edge of disaster.

Pascalene has the pleasures of a detective story, the challenge of a philosophical essay and the rewards of a fully-fledged novel of character and emotion. It is set in a series of wonderful locations which readers will delight in exploring for themselves. It is the first in the Pascalene series.

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