Historical Fiction
Charles-Henri Sanson has good looks, a fine education, and plenty of
money: everything, in fact, that a stylish young Parisian could ask for.
He also has an infamous family name—and he’s trapped in a hideous job
that no one wants.
The last thing Charles ever wanted to be was a hangman. But he’s the
eldest son of Paris’s most dreaded public official, and in the 1750s,
after centuries of superstition, people like him are outcasts. He knows
that the executioner’s son must become an executioner himself or starve,
for all doors are closed to him; although he loathes the role and would
much rather study medicine, society’s fears and prejudices will never
let him be anything else. And when disaster strikes, family duty demands
that Charles take his father’s place much sooner than he had ever
imagined.
Miles outside Paris, high-spirited François de La Barre is the carefree
teenager who Charles would like to have been, instead of the somber
public servant, bound by the Sansons’ motto of duty and honor, who
carries out brutal justice in the king’s name. François proves, though,
in the sophisticated, treacherous world of prerevolutionary France, to have a
dangerous gift for making enemies . . . and when at last their paths
converge, in this true story of destiny and conflicting loyalties,
Charles must make a horrifying choice.
Sure to appeal to fans of the “Hangman’s
Daughter” tales, The Executioner’s Heir, the true story of a pair of
tragic, converging lives, is a darkly atmospheric novel of
prerevolutionary France in all its elegance, decadence, and cruelty.