ARC Review – Lies Agreed Upon by Anatole Ternaux

Anatole Ternaux’s Lies Agreed Upon is the kind of book that reminds you why historical fiction matters. It doesn’t just re-stage events from the past; it unsettles them, pulls the rug out from under the “agreed upon” stories, and leaves you questioning where the truth ever lay. Set during the Napoleonic era, the novel takes the suspicious death of Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve—the much-maligned commander defeated at Trafalgar—and spins it into a haunting blend of political thriller, character study, and murder mystery.

We begin in Rennes, with Villeneuve carrying a valise full of documents that could prove Spain, France’s uneasy ally, has already turned to England. It’s his last chance at redemption, a desperate bid to salvage honor after years of disgrace. Yet within days, he is found in his inn room with multiple stab wounds, a bloodied penknife nearby. The official story is suicide. The details say otherwise. What follows is not a conventional whodunnit but an intricate investigation of how power silences men, how evidence can vanish, and how history itself conspires to cover its tracks.

Napoleon Bonaparte's - A change in Look

What makes the book so compelling is not just the plot, but the way it reimagines Napoleon and the people around him. Ternaux refuses the lazy caricatures. His Napoleon is witty, impatient, sardonic, and human—alternately bantering with his aides over cups of coffee and staring down reports that suggest his empire is less secure than he pretends. His inner circle, especially Bessières and Duroc, give the story a warmth and texture; their loyalty, dry humor, and subtle frustrations make the political conversations sparkle. Even the shadows of the state, men like Fouché and Savary, feel chillingly alive, embodiments of how truth gets managed, repackaged, or erased.

Villeneuve himself is drawn with tragic tenderness. Haunted by Trafalgar, mocked by his countrymen, and yet still clinging to a sense of duty, he becomes the book’s most human figure—a man trying to make himself useful to a world that has already written him off. His final hours, spent listening for footsteps in the inn’s hallways, clutching his pistol, trying to finish a letter that may never be read, are written with such tension and intimacy that you almost forget this is a man history brushed aside.

Ternaux’s prose balances elegance with wit. He is not afraid of modern turns of phrase, and he slips humor into the margins—Napoleon grousing about cold coffee, or Villeneuve being distracted by the noisy couple in the next room. These touches stop the novel from sinking into pure gloom and instead make the characters breathe. The research behind the book is meticulous, but it never feels like a textbook; it feels like eavesdropping on the past, with all its contradictions intact.

Readers looking for a neat resolution to Villeneuve’s death won’t find it here. The novel is more interested in the fog of history than in unmasking a single culprit. Was it the British? The Spanish? Napoleon’s own secret police? Or simply the machinery of the empire swallowing another inconvenient man? The lack of closure is deliberate, and by the end it feels less like a flaw and more like the point. The real crime is not only Villeneuve’s death, but the way history has erased him while enshrining others in myth.

Lies Agreed Upon is smart, darkly funny, and deeply thought-provoking. It reads as easily as a thriller but lingers like a work of philosophy, daring us to ask what history really is, and who gets to write it. For anyone fascinated by Napoleon, by the messiness of politics, or by the human stories hidden between the cracks of official history, this novel is a gift. It left me both satisfied and unsettled, and that, I think, is exactly what the author intended.

Rating: 4.5 / 5 – A brilliant reimagining of a forgotten death that becomes a meditation on memory, myth, and the lies that history needs in order to survive.

Reviewed by

J Gupta

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