The invention of the smile

When the Louvre in Paris opens its doors on 22 August 1911, a painting is missing from the Salon Carré: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Immediately, the prefect of police puts his men on high alert and has streets, railway stations and even harbours closed. But it is too late. La Joconde has disappeared. Juhel Lenoir of the Paris police is sent to find it - and the world is watching him ...Commissaire Lenoir lives in the most exciting city in the world - and is given the most difficult assignment he can imagine: to find the painting that beguiles the world. Who was so bewitched by the Mona Lisa that he could no longer live without her? On his hunt, the investigator meets the painter Pablo Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the expressive dancer Isabella Duncan and her guru, the Satanist Aleister Crowley; the musicians Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy; the brutal anarchists of the Bonnot Gang and France's greatest detective, Alphonse Bertillon, the "living Sherlock Holmes". The search for the Mona Lisa takes us through the Paris of the late Belle Époque, through artists' cafés on Montmartre, to the Opéra Garnier, to decadent Grandes Fêtes in the Bois de Boulogne and to absinthe-soaked bars on the Place Pigalle. This historical novel is both a detective novel and a painting of an era when Paris was the centre of the world.