Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Édouard Manet, Honoré Daumier and Gustave Caillebotte. A count dies leaving twelve millions and no legitimate heir anyone can find — and a valet, a mistress, a doctor and a lawyer all know a different piece of why. Gaboriau was a cavalry trooper and a lawyer's clerk before he invented Monsieur Lecoq and the French detective novel; here there is no detective at all, only the money, and it does the work of a murderer. Fifty-six plates by painters including Daumier and Degas picture the reading, the lessons, the thieves and the jockeys of a moneyed French world, the same society Gaboriau's fortune hunts through.
