A preserved human head in a glass jar. A label that reads Guillotine. No name. No file. No record of how it got there. When twenty-five-year-old museum researcher Vance Pappas discovers the jar during a routine search of the attic at Philadelphia's Cutter Museum, nobody on staff can explain it. The jar has been there for decades. Institutional memory has long since dissolved. The cardboard box covering it does not mention the contents. Vance could have logged it, filed it, and moved on. Instead he opens it. What follows is an obsessive, methodical investigation that pulls Vance and French exchange student Juliette Saint-Martin across two continents and through nearly a century of buried history. From the university libraries of West Chester, Pennsylvania to the Ministry of Justice archives in Paris. From the sun-drenched vineyards of Seine-et-Marne to the brutal penal colony camps of French Guiana. From a deathbed confession in a Paris hospital ward to the corridors of a French government that chose silence over justice. The man in the jar has a name. He has a winery, a family, and a story that the French Republic spent seventy years trying to erase. Read more

From the Publisher The French government convicted an innocent man of murdering his family. He died in their penal colonies serving four life sentences. The killer confessed on his deathbed. France stayed silent for seventy years. In 1997, a glass jar in a Philadelphia museum attic changed everything. The Benoit Winery Murders by J.A. Keating Some men refuse to stay forgotten. Behind the label is a winery owner wrongfully convicted of murdering his family. Behind the conviction is a government that buried the truth to protect itself. Behind the silence is one researcher who refused to stop looking. About J.A. Keating J.A. Keating practiced law for 22 years before becoming a fiction writer. He wrote The Benoit Winery Murders longhand, one page at a time, on whatever paper was available. It is his first novel. The Benoit Winery Murders is the first book in the Jimmy Keats series. The Jimmy Keats Series The Benoit Winery Murders is book one. Crossing Sabers arrives before Christmas 2026. More to follow.