Eighteenth Name

Montréal, 1734. A city of merchants, soldiers, servants and slaves is already uneasy when fire tears through rue Saint-Paul. In the aftermath, suspicion hardens quickly around Marie-Josèphe dite Angélique, accused of setting the blaze.But Étienne Vallière is pursuing a different question: who is he?His name appears in records that should prove a life. Instead, each document opens another gap. A hidden network has been moving identities, rewriting origins and turning official papers into weapons. Families can disappear behind ink. Children can inherit names that were never theirs. And somewhere inside the system is the truth about Étienne's own past.As witnesses contradict one another and the authorities demand certainty, Étienne is drawn toward the Dufarge family, a concealed household, and a chain of records designed to survive scrutiny. To discover what happened, he must decide which evidence deserves belief—and what a man becomes when every document describing him may be false.Set against the real Montréal fire of 1734 and the prosecution of Angélique, The Eighteenth Man is a historical conspiracy thriller about identity, memory and the dangerous power of an official record. It is a story of pursuit, lineage, deception, and a name worth killing to protect.