Dear Reader

Sepulchre is the second bestselling novel in my Languedoc Trilogy, a sequence of three novels set in - and inspired by - the landscape and history of the south of France. A timeslip adventure novel - set in 19th century and contemporary France - it is about Tarot, about ghosts, about the power of music and place, about the relationship between the two great modern republics of the 20th century, France and America. It seemed only fitting, then, that my contemporary heroine in Sepulchre should be an American.

What of the historical background to Sepulchre? The medieval Cité of Carcassonne sits on a small hill alongside the river Aude. This extraordinary fortress was at the heart of my novel Labyrinth. But cross over the Pont Vieux, with its vaults of ancient stones, and you enter the 19th century bastide of six-storey houses. And it was here that I discovered the themes and plotlines that came together in Sepulchre.

At the top of the 19th century town – as intriguing as a tale by Edith Wharton or Henry James – there’s a canal, serene and picturesque. It was here that, in my imagination, I first saw a boatman pull a well-dressed woman’s body from the sluggish water. And beyond the canal is the railway station. On these platforms I imagined my heroes – Léonie and her brother Anatole – arrive from Paris, then later flee in desperation from their enemies.

Fin-de-siècle Paris is central to the early part of the story, with its esoteric salons and dabbling with the occult. My historic heroine, Léonie, lives in an apartment next to the composer Claude Debussy. She walks with her mother in the Parc Monceau. But I also needed a contemporary heroine to investigate the tragedy of 1891, a woman with sufficient bravery and determination to lead me to the heart of the mystery. It was in Paris that I first met Meredith, like a ghost out of the corner or my eye. An American author and critic, Meredith Martin is researching an autobiography of Léonie’s neighbour Debussy.

But the heart of the Sepulchre story takes place further south and can be glimpsed from the gothic St-Vincent cemetery set on the hill above the railway station in Carcassonne. From a vantage point between the ornate tombs I found an uninterrupted view south, the whole history of Carcassonne laid out in front of me. In the foreground, the turn of the century Hôtel du Terminus. In the middle distance, the battlements of the biscuit-colored fortress Cité. In the far distance, the eternal green hills and snowbound peaks of the Pyrenees. That was Léonie and Anatole’s destination, a mysterious estate dominated by a beautiful manor house on a thickly-wooded hillside above the fashionable Pyrenean spa town of Rennes-les-Bains, just a couple of miles from Rennes-le-Château, home of the enigmatic priest Bérenger Saunière. Here, no story-teller could ever be lost for inspiration or any visitor fail to be charmed by the beauty and splendour of a natural landscape sculpted by time in forests and rivers, limestone and brown and red earth. It is a place of ghosts, of secrets.

Sepulchre brings some of those ghosts to life.