La montre en or - Prix du Roman d'aventures 2026

by Paul Halter

Orville, 1991. Une maison sous la pluie, une femme terrifiée, une montre en or ... Ces images, seuls souvenirs d'un film vu lorsqu'il était enfant, hantent l'esprit troublé d'André Levêque, un auteur dramatique. Obnubilé par le désir de le revoir, il va tenter de plonger dans son inconscient avec l'aide d'un psychanalyste.

Broomfield, 1911. Victoria Sanders, directrice impitoyable de l'entreprise de feu son mari, invite ses employés dans sa résidence secondaire. Le lendemain, elle est retrouvée morte, dans son jardin. A-t-elle succombé à une chute fatale ? Ou a-t-elle été assassinée ? Les pas dans la neige indiquent pourtant qu'elle était seule. Owen Burns, dandy détective, et son acolyte Achille Stock vont épauler Scotland Yard sur l'affaire.

Il n'est jamais bon de remuer les cendres du passé. Ne serait-ce qu'en jouant avec une montre cassé lorsque les aiguilles se mettent à tourner
à l'envers, il y a danger...

PRIX DU ROMAN D'AVENTURES

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2026

About the author

Paul Halter is a writer of crime fiction known for his locked room mysteries. Halter pursued technical studies in his youth before joining the French Marines in the hope of seeing the world. Disappointed with the lack of travel, he left the military and, for a while, sold life insurance while augmenting his income playing the guitar in the local dance orchestra. He gave up life insurance for a job in the state-owned telecommunications company, where he works in what is presently known as France Télécom. Halter has been compared with the late John Dickson Carr, generally considered the 20th century master of the locked room genre. Throughout his nearly thirty novels his genre has been almost entirely impossible crimes, and as a critic has said "Although strongly influenced by Carr and Christie, his style is his own and he can stand comparison with anyone for the originality of his plots and puzzles and his atmospheric writing."

His first published novel, La Quatrieme Porte ("The Fourth Door")was published in 1988 and won the Prix de Cognac, given for detective literature. The following year, his novel Le Brouillard Rouge (Red Mist) won "one of the highest accolades in French mystery literature", the Prix du Roman d'Aventures. He has now published more than thirty novels. Several of his short stories have been translated into English; by June 2010 six will have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; ten were collected and published by Wildside Press as The Night of the Wolf.