After Blood-red Rivers and Flight of the Storks, Jean-Christophe Grange breaks through the barriers of the traditional thriller.

As a child Diane Thiberge was the victim of an assault. Now 30, an ethnologist specialising in the study of predatory animals, and a woman adept in the martial arts, she believes she has at last found a meaning and purpose to her life when she decides to adopt a five-year-old Thai boy, Liu-San, whom she christens Lucien. A nightmare ensues: on her return to France, Lucien has an accident and is declared to be brain-dead. A series of murders, however, makes Diane realise that her son is no ordinary child, but the prey of sinister and paranormal forces.

"A hair-raising thriller from the redoubtable Jean-Christophe Grange, who in the space of a few years has made a name for himself with novels that bridge the gap between horror and detection. The Stone Council encom passes telepathy, hypnosis, psychokinesis, state secrets and recondite forms of killing . . . I loved it" Anita Brookner Spectator
"Grange's hallmarks combine the confrontation between good and evil, the pace and rhythm of the best Hollywood cinema and the majesty of Greek tragedy" Sebastien Lapaque, Figaro
"A psychological thriller that moves at pace and leaves one with an unquenchable and delicious sense of unease" Francois Busnel, Express

Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress, set in a nearby town. When Lucien displays violent imagery in his crayon sketches, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother's grisly work, and why he's exposed to it. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point's murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?

In A Child's Book of True Crime, Hooper brilliantly portrays a young woman reluctant to enter or conform to the world of adults. Kate Byrne is compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, a misfit among their parents. And though Lucie's father brings her to life sexually in scenes of escalating eroticism, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present - and it is her unravelling that Hooper captures so chillingly in this taut, charged and already celebrated first novel.