In this second tome of the Arcana trilogy, the Big Game continues, implacably. Now it’s the hour of confrontation between the Croupier and Matthias, our hero… But hadn’t this battle been foreseen right from the beginning by the Organization’s strategic planners?
The Lament of the Arcana starts in the midst of the heat wave of 2003, and ends with the fall grape harvest, temperance oblige. In an agonizing France, crushed by the heat, consumed by anxiety over the profound mutations of globalization and liberalism, the Organization seems to have found the ideal playground for its terrible maneuvering.
Under the aegis of Clint Baskerville, it has chosen its victims. This time they will be incarnating the seven arcana of knowledge (Justice, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength, the Hanged Man, XIII, Temperance). But as the Croupier executes his first contracts, with growing doubts – does he really incarnate Arcana XIII? – new players seem to be entering the game. Discreetly hidden in strange Provençal properties, the murders multiply, with Nostradamus’s Alpilles and the Card Masters’ Marseilles turned into a bloody battlefield. In the midst of our daily life, the protagonists wage war without mercy, distant echoes of well-known and oft-repeated minor news items, carefully orchestrated happenings, barely deformed mirrors held up to the anonymous crowd we are.
From betrayals to dramatic upheavals, Matthias and his companions won’t emerge from the Organization’s Machiavellian plan unscathed. The small group, battered by forces beyond their grasp, will pay a steep price to stay at the gaming table, and will need the intervention of new allies to avoid total defeat.