Genie St. Onge’s heart is broken more often than it’s not—but that doesn’t stop her from diving in head-first when she meets Jacob Ford. Their connection is instantaneous and consuming, and they agree to meet again in Paris. In a heady mix of sugared pastries and rumpled bedsheets, they begin plotting their future together. In the dreamy apartment they're renting in the 11th arrondissement, they become intoxicated by each other.
Until Jacob disappears.
Genie knows Jacob would never leave her. Not by choice. When phone calls to hospitals turn up nothing, she grows convinced that someone must have taken him. It's the only explanation.
Under the scrutiny of the French police, however, Genie’s story doesn’t quite hold up—and it sounds like Jacob might not be all he seems, either. Through police interviews with Genie and nearby residents of the 11th arrondissement, the truth remains elusive. She swears has no idea what happened to Jacob – so why doesn’t her story align with anyone else’s?
A romantic rendezvous in Paris quickly spirals into disaster in Jurczyk's latest thriller. This sophisticated, character-driven mystery unfolds through a unique epistolary narrative via police transcripts and interviews. With its stylish atmospheric setting, perfect pacing, and clever premise, The Paris Files delivers a constant stream of paranoia that will keep the reader guessing until the very last unforgettable twist. A must read!
EVA JURCZYK was born in Katowice, Poland and wound up halfway around the world in a Canadian city that often masquerades as New York City in the movies. As her day job, she buys books, building library collections for the University of Toronto Libraries, and by night she writes mystery novels including the best-selling The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Jurczyk lives in Toronto with her husband and son.
Q & A with Eva Jurczyk*
GWR: What does your writing process look like? How many hours a day do you write? Are you a pantser/gardner or a plotter/architect?
EJ: I'm a full-time parent and full-time librarian at the University of Toronto, so I squeeze in writing wherever I can. Between five and six every morning is my dedicated writing time but I also bring my notebook when I'm in the stands at my son's tennis lesson, when I'm on the streetcar, or on days I can take a lunch break at work. My joke is though, that this is only my transcription time, not my writing time. Writing is happening constantly, even if only in my head. I spend about a year before I start working on a project making the outline. And that outline is formed when I'm out for a run, when I'm searing beef for a bourguignon, and when I wake up with an idea for a plot twist at three in the morning. All of that time thinking about a book and sending myself emails with ideas or character quirks is writing time, even if it's not as glamorous as sitting at my desk and scribbling by candlelight.
As for my process, I'm pretty old fashioned. I liked to write my first draft by hand becauses it forces me to slow down and really think about every word. Typing that handwritten draft forces a thorough first edit. Then I'll put away a manuscript for a little bit and after I come back and make revision notes, I'll delete the file and retype it from scratch. I heard once that doing it that way ensures a better book because you'll never retype a bad sentence. When I have a draft I'm happy with I listen to the book using Word's read aloud feature. It helps catch typos and ensures an engaging read for anyone who picks up the audiobook. I keep iterating that way until my editors tell me it's time to put it down.
GWR: How long did it take you to write The Paris Files, and how many drafts were there before publication?
EJ: This story had a lot of lives and took many different shapes over about four years. I'd guess there were about 10 drafts. That's 10 complete rewrites where I started from page one, and lots of tinkering in between. It started as a very different book. The same central characters, but they were in Paris during a pandemic. It was speculative fiction and I still like the idea but I was (wisely) advised that it would be a long time before readers were rushing to pick up pandemic novels. In later drafts, the officers who were conducting the interviews were major characters and the book was written as interviews but that read too much like a screenplay. For The Paris Files, editing was a matter of paring things back until we got to the central story of Genie and Jacob and their zany neighbours.
GWR: How did you come up with the concept for this novel?
EJ: There were a few threads of inspiration. In 2017 when I was on my maternity leave I was lucky enough to spend a month in Paris, at a rented flat at 44 Rue Oberkampf. We picked up our keys from a surly fruitmonger across the street, said our daily bonjour to the building's concierge who was always polishing the wooden stair rail, and when we left I felt like I understood Paris in a way I never had as a tourist. I knew I wanted to write a book not just about Paris, but about that little residential corner. Not long after, my best friend embarked on an Eat, Pray, Love style trip around the world. Almost immediately she met a much younger man and had a brief affair with him in Thailand. They decided they'd meet, months later, in Porto, Portugal, but they wouldn't text or call each other until then. Needless to say, I was deeply suspicious of this scheme, and it gave me the beginnings of the idea for this book.
GWR: Can you talk about the epistolary structure of the book—how did this come about? Is there any significance of the case number (23-019)?
EJ: Gosh, I love an epistolary structure. I think it's because I'm a fundamentally nosy person. If you leave me alone in your office I will definitely rifle through the papers on your desk. There's something thrilling about constructing a story through documentary evidence. The idea to structure the novel through police reports started with a very different sort of evidence. At first I thought I'd have interstitial chapters, where Genie's friends back home would be talking about this young lover of hers in their group chat, doubting whether he even exists. I think this particular story works so well as a he-said, she-said and the police reports are a delicious way to deliver that, since the reader knows that every narrator is a little bit unreliable, and has to decide for themselves who to believe.
The case number: only that it signals to the reader that we’re in 2023.
GWR: Do you hear your words as dialogue or do you visualize a scene to write the story?
EJ: Dialogue is my favourite part of story telling and I often have conversation snippets floating through my head. That said, I couldn't describe to you how writing happens. Dialogue first? Scene first? When things are really working it just flows out and I never quite understand how. My favourite scenes I've ever written are the ones I've scarcely had to think about it, the ones that flowed out as if by magic. In The Paris Files, that happened with many of the exchanges between Genie and the grouchy fruit monger.
GWR: How do you write an effective red herring when you are so close to the material?
EJ: I wish I knew the answer! In early edits I'm sometimes accused of not telling enough of the story, not revealing enough to the reader, because there's so much information in my head that I've forgotten to put on the page. In the case of mysteries and thrillers, I think the best red herrings come in editing. Often something will happen in Chapter 30 and I'll realize that if I just add something in Chapter 5 that's somewhat related, it will land brilliantly with the reader. Ceding those red herrings is a lot of fun. I try to make sure there are enough clues and red herrings in all my books that a reader will have a great experience coming across them on their second read, once they know the reveals.
GWR: Do you build your story around a twist/reveal, or does that happen as you write?
EJ: It varies by story. In the case of The Paris Files there's a twist about halfway through that I knew I wanted to write towards. I knew how I wanted the book to end, so I was building to that reveal. But a novel is a collection of dozens of little twists and surprises and most of those occur to me spontaneously while I'm writing. For all my outlining, I don't know who my characters are going to be until I start spending time with them on the page, and when they reveal themselves, they're always surprising me with their actions.
GWR: Intuition verses craft—when do you know to make the hard turns?
EJ: Not to bring the spectre of A.I. into the room, but writerly intuition is what delights readers in the way a computer generated story will never be able to. Craft is important. In the case of writers, the best way to develop craft is reading widely and voraciously. Knowing the rules of genre and narrative is important if you're going to effectively tell a story. But a computer can learn to do that. Once you know the rules of genre and narrative, you can throw those out and trust your intuition to tell you when to subvert the rules to truly surprise your readers. The best books are just a little bit weird, and no book on the writer's craft can teach weirdness.
GWR: The setting is in the title of the book—what role did Paris have when constructing the mystery?
EJ: The book couldn't have taken place anywhere except Paris. We needed to be in the most romantic city in the world to really feel the effect of a romance gone wrong. We needed to be in a place that exists in every reader's imagination. Even if you've never been to Paris, you've probably dreamed of it. I've been lucky enough to go back to Paris lots of times in my life and so many of those little Parisian details found their way into the book. The cafe in the centre court of the Petit Palais is beautiful place to describe, but it's also a disconcerting location for Genie, who thinks Jacob could be behind any one of the columns.
Beyond the place itself, the food in Paris was incredibly important. There are characters with big, unquenchable appetites and characters drawn to the divine qualities of simple foods and that too is perfectly Parisian.
GWR: What do you think a thriller can reveal about human nature that other genres can’t? What does The Paris Files divulge?
EJ: Thrillers explore what scares us. Stephen King was being held hostage by a crippling cocaine and alcohol addiction, and he wrote Misery. The scariest thing in a thriller is often not the murder, it's the social conditions. I wrote a book about a woman who's about to turn forty and her fear that she'll be alone forever. Worse than that, I wrote about the way that others judge her for not being partnered off with kids. The crime in thrillers is often fantastical but the anxiety is real, and I hope I've represented that well in The Paris Files.
GWR: What draws you to darker themes?
EJ: My Slavic forefathers weren't especially cheery people? I live in Canada where it's dark by dinnertime for six months of the year? I do enjoy reading some lighthearted fare. Nothing pulls me out of a reading slump like an Emily Henry romance book. But I've always known I'm too cynical to ever write anything like that. Women, generally, spend a lot of time worried they're about to be murdered. Out for a run before dawn? You might get murdered. Weird noise at your kitchen window in the middle of the night? Probably a serial killer. Alone in an underground parking garage at any time of day? You're toast. It's hard not to want to explore those ideas in fiction when you spend so much time thinking about them. At least in a book I have some control over who lives and who dies.
GWR: What’s the one element of a thriller that is a must?
EJ: Humour. When a book doesn't work for me at all, it's because it's humourless. Some thrillers are written totally straight faced and that's just not an accurate reflection of life. Someone is going to fart at a funeral, people are always going to laugh. In a thriller, a laugh relieves the tension and makes the thrills more acute. The recently published list in the New York Times of the best thrillers of the 21st century shows that the definition of 'thriller' is expansive. Give me all the versions of a thriller, but sneak a laugh or two in there.
GWR: If your book was a beverage, what would it be?
EJ: A pastis. A tourist might come to Paris and drink a Kir Royal but for their apéritif, my characters are going to have the anise-flavoured spirit, served over water and ice. Is it for everyone? No. But it's undeniably Parisian.
GWR: What are you working on now?
