Dark December.

Twenty-four evenings. Twenty-four true stories. Each one happened on that day.

On December 5, five Navy bombers take off from Fort Lauderdale and fly into nothing. On the 8th, a man waits outside a New York apartment building with a record he wants signed. On the 15th, a lighthouse goes dark off the Hebrides, and its three keepers are never found. On the 24th, a cart loaded with gunpowder stands in a Paris street, on the route of a First Consul on his way to the Opera.

This book reads like an Advent calendar: one story a night, ten minutes, and you don’t open tomorrow’s door. Riddles, impostures, disappearances, disasters, miscarriages of justice: cases the world has stopped telling, chosen because they happened on their date, and told for what they changed, a law, a science, a way of judging.

Nothing is embroidered. The sources are at the back. When nobody knows, the book says so. And every evening closes on a forgotten detail, checked, that the usual tellings leave out.

Vincent Sorbier digs out the true stories the world has stopped telling, and gives them back their place without ever giving in to sensationalism.