Marie-Claire Bernard was the widow of a national hero and the daughter of a wealthy, politically powerful family and her murder threatened domestic consequences for the French Government. Eager to avoid uproar in the press, the Minister of Justice summons Gé rard de Montclaire – the most renowned detective of the era— to assume a familiar role. Examining Magistrate, with sweeping powers to find and prosecute the killer. Montclaire soon learns that Marie-Claire was in possession of three rare and priceless porcelain bowls of the Tang Dynasty. The legendary bowls— called The Tears of Buddha -- are now missing. A motive for murder? Soon, however, what seems to be a clear case of criminal murder and theft is overturned by developments that take Montclaire into the bizarre world of criminal syndicates, espionage, code-breaking and the German Kaiser’ s boundless ambitions and hatred of France. Following every thread of through a complicated skene of evidence and even surviving a savage attack, Montclaire ultimately sets a clever trap that ensnares Marie Claire’ s killer. But, at the moment of his victory the French Government descends upon his case and for reasons of state denies him the ultimate victory – a conviction. Everything seemed to rest for several years at an unsatisfactory conclusion, until that is one day an odd newspaper article about a murder in Milan suggests an end to the story of Marie Claire’ s murder and the missing Tears of Buddha.

E.A. Allen is a History Professor, cattle farmer, and retired CIA intelligence officer. When he's not out chasing staying cows that have no respect for fences, or tracking-down undergraduates who have no respect for assignment deadlines, he's at his desk, writing mysteries in the great tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers.