Paris, in the third year of the Great War. Captain Patrice Belval, a war hero invalided home with a wooden leg, has fallen in love with the nurse who tended him — the gentle woman the soldiers call Little Mother Coralie. When he learns that Coralie is in danger and rescues her from her assailants, he is dragged into a conspiracy far darker than he imagined: one bound up with her own marriage, a sinister household, and a fortune in gold that has been vanishing out of France toward the enemy. The Golden Triangle is Maurice Leblanc’s wartime Arsène Lupin novel — a thriller, a treasure-hunt, and a love story braided into one. Eighteen hundred bags of gold, worth a king’s ransom, lie hidden somewhere along the Seine, and a patient, ruthless enemy means to have them. For most of the book Belval and Coralie are out of their depth, ordinary good people against a foe too clever for them — until a stranger named Don Luis Perenna steps onto the stage, and everything changes. Atmospheric and tender, steeped in the textures of a city at war, The Golden Triangle turns the playful gentleman-thief into a patriot and the war’s anxieties into an adventure that ends, against the darkness of its moment, in hope. It remains one of the most distinctive entertainments in the Lupin canon. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s wartime origins, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
