Dr. Caroline Poiron, an expert in ancient Chinese manuscripts, toiled in virtual anonymity in her remote office at the Ecole Normale Supérieur. Her life changed in the course of a single day when she found a fragment of a codex long-thought to be a hoax: the Qiu Codex. After six months of painstaking translation and decryption, she found herself in a hidden Buddhist temple in the remote Kingdom of Bhutan, where she carefully removed a casket bearing a relic of immeasurable value, and smuggled it back to France. A week later two bodies were discovered on opposite ends of Paris, one unidentifiable, the other, the daughter of two prominent Paris physicians. The cases lay frustratingly dormant until the father of one of the victims was elected President of the Republic of France. Mattéo Ranvier has become one of the world's most successful composers and musicians, a rock star by everyone's assessment; single, wealthy, and unreservedly quirky. He possesses immense, almost unbounded, talent, uniquely blended with a strange musical form of synesthesia and a healthy dose of Asperger's Syndrome. Behind the glare of the fame he publically eschews harbors a secret and shadowy past as a member of a top-secret paramilitary organization known as Les Aiguilles, "The Needles," so named for their method of disposing of France's enemies. It is a past he has successfully confined to the outer recesses of his creative mind. When Mattéo Ranvier overhears a group of men plotting to assassinate Dr. Michel Saunier, the popular President of France, he unwittingly finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy which threatens the future of the Republic. He ingeniously encodes the details of the plot in a score of wedding music for his friend and mentee, Anne-Thérèse Gaudet, a brilliant young cryptanalyst at the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence. She decodes the information in the nick of time, and the plot is foiled. However, it is soon discovered that the assassination plot is linked to the President's reopening the investigations of murders of his daughter, and the unidentified body found across town, a woman simply known as "Anne the unknown." Anne-Thérèse Gaudet is in charge of the probe, and soon discovers the terrifying truth that the evidence points to one suspect alone, Zhou Liang-Wei, a former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieur, an acquaintance of both women, and the President-Elect of China. Is Zhou really capable of murder, or is he being framed? As events spiral from France to Belize, to the USA, and finally to China, Mattéo Ranvier is forced to confront his clandestine past, and team up with Anne-Thérèse Gaudet and his former Needles boss, Fabian Plet, to subdue the killer before they become victims.
