Fourteen years ago Véronique d'Hergemont's father fled with her infant son, and both were reported drowned. She has mourned them ever since. Then, watching a newsreel film by pure chance, she sees her own girlhood signature scrawled on the wall of a deserted cabin in the background of a shot — writing no one living should have been able to make. The impossible clue draws her west, through a trail of fresh corpses, to the fog-bound island of Sarek off the coast of Brittany. Sarek is a place of dread. Thirty granite reefs ring its shore — the “thirty coffins” — and its people live under an ancient prophecy: four women crucified, thirty coffins, and a hidden treasure called the God-Stone, the Stone of God that gives life and death. The islanders are dying one by one, in the very order the legend foretells, and Véronique arrives to find her own name among the four women marked for the cross — and her lost son alive at the centre of the horror. Driving it all is not a sorcerer but a man who has read the old curse and chosen to fulfil it, murdering his way toward the treasure in the name of destiny. For most of the book Véronique stands alone against what seems to be fate itself — until the friend she has appealed to arrives: a man calling himself Don Luis Perenna, who is Arsène Lupin, and who proposes to take the whole supernatural machine apart by reason alone. The Secret of Sarek was the first Lupin novel Maurice Leblanc wrote after the Great War, and its tone is the darkest of the series: a genuine gothic horror story wrapped around a detective's rational unmasking, set on one of the eeriest islands in popular fiction. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the novel and its place in the Lupin saga, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
