Love and Terror — Alan Jolis

It is the height of the French Revolution, and Robespierre has turned Paris into a city of suspicion and fear. Joseph Fouche, Robespierre's dreaded police commissioner, is a cold-blooded revolutionary whose loyalty to the regime has come into question: he is unwillingly falling in love with Nenette, a former prisoner he saved from the guillotine. Because of her uncanny resemblance to Marie Antoinette, he had planned to use her to entrap other royalists, but now passion is eating away at his hard heart.

When Marie Antoinette escapes from prison on the eve of her trial, Fouche, who had been charged with her safekeeping and execution, covers up her absence in the only way he can: he substitutes Nenette for the queen. If the real queen is not found by morning, Nenette will go to the guillotine in her place, to save the Revolution and Fouche's own neck.

As Alan Jolis's fast-paced narrative charts Fouche's relentless search through the streets of Paris, Love and Terror illuminates -- with rich detail and jolts of humor -- the full sweep of Parisian life during this strange and violent era. Jolis's Paris is a place where anyone might be an informant and where the most cunning maneuverings are required simply to survive. Suspicion and fear plague a pageant of characters, from street riffraff to the aristocracy, from the American pamphleteer Tom Paine to Marie Antoinette herself -- whose doomed romance with a Swedish count is a fateful counterpoint to the story of Fouche and Nenette. As dawn approaches, the tension builds steadily toward a riveting culmination, and Alan Jolis proves himself a master of the classic novel of passion and suspense.