Chris Lloyd is the author of the Eddie Giral crime thriller series, the result of his lifelong interest in resistance and collaboration in Occupied France.
Living under the shadow cast by his experiences in World War One, Eddie Giral is a Paris police detective forced to come to terms with the Nazi Occupation of the city. Seeking to negotiate a path between the occupier and the occupied, Eddie struggles to retain some semblance of humanity while walking a fine line between resistance and collaboration. However, his greatest challenge possibly lies in overcoming his own inner struggle in asking what justice is when the notion of justice itself becomes as dangerous, blurred and confused as the times. The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, was published by Orion in September 2020.
Chris grew up in Cardiff and, after graduating in Spanish and French, spent twenty-four years in Catalonia, where he taught English and worked in educational publishing and as a travel writer and translator. Besides this, he also lived in Grenoble for six months, researching the French Resistance movement, a far deeper and more complex subject than history often teaches us. He now lives in his native Wales where he works as a writer and translator.
Praise for The Unwanted Dead
‘‘Terrific.’
THE SUNDAY TIMES, Best Books of the Month
‘A thoughtful, haunting thriller.’
MICK HERRON
‘A brilliant, breathtaking tour de force.’
DAVID YOUNG
‘A powerful and morally nuanced crime novel … Both a gripping murder mystery and a vivid recreation of Paris under German Occupation.’
ANDREW TAYLOR
‘Lloyd’s Second World War Paris is rougher than Alan Furst’s, and Eddie Giral, his French detective, is way edgier than Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther … Ranks alongside both for its convincingly cloying atmosphere of a city subjugated to a foreign power, a plot that reaches across war-torn Europe and into the rifts in the Nazi factions, and a hero who tries to be a good man in a bad world. Powerful stuff.’
THE TIMES
‘Monumentally impressive … A truly wonderful book. If somebody’d given it to me and told me it was the latest Robert Harris, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Eddie Giral is a wonderful creation.’
ALIS HAWKINS
‘The best kind of crime novel: gripping, thought-provoking and moving. In Detective Eddie Giral, Chris Lloyd has created a flawed hero not just for occupied Paris, but for our own times, too.’
KATHERINE STANSFIELD