Brice and Emma had bought their new home in the countryside together. And then Emma disappeared. Now, as he awaits her return, Brice busies himself with DIY and walks around the village. He gradually comes to know his new neighbours including Blanche, an enigmatic woman in white, who has lived on her own in the big house by the graveyard since the death of her father, to whom Brice bears a curious resemblance...

At least vultures have the decency to wait until their prey's dead before picking it apart ...After losing his wife and suffering a stroke, cantankerous retiree Edouard Lavenant has moved from Lyon to a village in the mountains with his put-upon nurse, Therese. One day, a man comes to the door claiming to be Edouard's long-lost son. Edouard's temper seems to be softening, but it isn't long before the local vultures are circling overhead ...

Blaise should never have hung around in that charmless little provincial town. The job offer that attracted him the first place had failed to materialize. He should have got on the first train back to Paris, but Fate decided otherwise.

A chance encounter with a beautiful blonde in the town post-office and Blaise is hooked - he realizes he'll do anything to stay by her side, and soon finds himself working for her husband, a funeral director. But the tension in this strange love triangle begins to mount, and eventually results in a highly unorthodox burial...

Volume 1 includes How's the Pain?, the tale of an ageing `pest exterminator' taking on one last job on the French Riviera; The Panda Theory, in which a stranger, Gabriel, arrives in a Breton town and befriends the locals ... but is he as angelic as he seems?; and The A26, in which a new Picardy motorway brings modernity close to a flat in which a brother and sister live together, haunted by terminal illness and the events of 1945.

Written over a 15-year period from the mid '90s, Garnier's short novels weave a profound and darkly comic tapestry of human experience. Volume 2 includes Boxes, which tells the story of Brice, `the sole survivor of the natural disaster that at one time or another strikes us all, known as `moving house''; The Front Seat Passenger, in which a widower discovers his wife had a lover and decides to track down his widow; The Islanders, whose protagonist Olivier finds himself thrown back together with a childhood friend with whom he shares a dark secret; and Moon in a Dead Eye, in which the paranoia of the residents of a gated retirement village spins out of control.

The future is on its way to Picardy with the construction of a huge motorway. But nearby is a house where nothing has changed since 1945. Traumatised by events that year, Yolande hasn't left her home since. And life has not been kinder to Bernard, her brother, who is now in the final months of a terminal illness. Realizing that he has so little time left, Bernard's gloom suddenly lifts. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless - and murderous -