Inspired by the death mask of a 19th-century Frenchwoman whose identity has never been discovered, Hansen's diffuse latest (after Asmodeus) is set during France's 1889 Exposition Universelle. Traveling through the forests west of Paris, gendarme Emile Brassard comes across the half-buried corpse of a man whose throat has been cut and, nearby, a young woman in a Romani wagon. Her dirty nails and abstracted state make Brassard suspect her of the killing. Solving the murder could help him get restored to active duty after an unjust suspension, so he follows her to the city. When she leaves the wagon behind, Brassard hires a street urchin to follow her while he awaits the woman's return. As she visits the Eiffel Tower among other Exposition sights, the unnamed woman attracts the attention of artist François Michaud and impresario Bruno Chavarin. Michaud wants to paint her and Chavarin to cast her in one of his revues, but after each befriends her, she vanishes. Meanwhile, the clues to her past Brassard finds under the wagon's floorboards and a final brief encounter with her prompt Brassard to rethink his career. Though Hansen's reflection on the way one individual can become the focus of many others' dreams is thought-provoking, there are too many disparate threads. In the end, it doesn't quite gel. (Nov.)

With the 1889 Paris Exposition as a backdrop, Hansen's whodunit is a mélange of the strange, the infamous, and the grisly. In a morgue not far from Notre Dame de Paris, a daily display of unidentified bodies has become a macabre public attraction. Among the cadavers lies a beautiful young woman with a Mona Lisa smile, pulled from the Seine, a presumed suicide. A preface reveals that the real woman called "L'Inconnue," or "the Unknown," whose plaster death mask became a sensational objet d'art, was not only the model for the first CPR dummy, but the source of endless speculation as to the circumstances of her demise. This speculation drives the extended flashback that comprises most of Hansen's novel. We first see the woman--alive, that is--in a forest near the road to Paris. She has killed a man who, the reader assumes, has raped her and buried his body ineptly. She then enters a nearby covered wagon, pulled by a donkey, and drives it to Paris. En route, there's a chance encounter with Brassard, a disgraced police officer who senses she's behind the dead body he and his dog discovered earlier, disinterred by wolves. Brassard surreptitiously tails the wagon to Paris. A colorful panoply of peripheral characters, including a hapless artist and an "impresario of the lower entertainments," and settings like the Paris catacombs and, of course, the newly erected Eiffel Tower distracts us from the meandering irrelevancies of the plot. By investigating the young woman, is Brassard seeking to overcome the contretemps that led him to join a Foreign Legion mission to Indochina and lose an ear? Is the novel really about the sexual abuse the unknown woman endures in life and her objectification after death? Or is it merely a display case for Hansen's gorgeous prose, which sometimes sacrifices meaning on the altar of mellifluousness? The main attraction here is a troubled detective who doesn't fit the mold. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

It's a safe bet that most individuals pursuing a CPR certification would never wonder about the source of the resuscitation dummy's face. They should. Resusci Annie was modeled on the death mask of an unidentified woman pulled from the Seine in 1889. Hansen gives this woman a backstory, revealed through the investigations of Brassard, a former POW and gendarme who encounters the woman on the road to Paris. The Exposition Universelle is drawing to a close, and elements of this grand event and Parisian society provide a vivid tableau for the unknown woman's story. In a Moulin Rouge-type whirlwind, there is aging playboy Chavarin, Michaud, a penniless painter and thief, along with madams, chorus girls, street urchins, and countesses. The story plays out in settings as varied as the pastoral countryside, the top of the Eiffel Tower, and the crypts beneath Paris. Hansen captures the zeitgeist and combines it with the tension of a slowly unraveling mystery; this is a novel with a filmic feel that will engage readers from beginning to denouement.