Alban Chastel
Jura Mountains, France
“His ancestor killed the Beast of Gévaudan. He is the beast.”
The Books
Malbête
Alban Chastel has spent five years keeping everything inside the fence. As Regional Director of a remote wildlife reserve in the Jura Mountains, he runs his world with clinical precision: GPS collars, thermal cameras, drone patrols, and protocols for every variable. His pregnant Eurasian lynx is weeks from delivering. His surveillance systems are flawless. His record is perfect. The silver whistle he wears on a lanyard around his neck is a family heirloom he has never questioned. He does not know it was made from a silver fragment of the Marian medallion used to cast the bullet that killed a monster in 1767. He does not know the monster was his great-uncle. When poachers breach the reserve and destroy everything Alban was built to protect, the grief that follows triggers something in his blood that no protocol can contain. A transformation his family has carried for two hundred and fifty-nine years activates for the first time, and the rational mind that defined him finds itself sharing a body with something older, faster, and far less interested in rules. As Alban hunts the men who destroyed his life's work, he discovers that the attack was not random. The trail leads back through layers of conspiracy to someone he trusted completely, someone whose warmth was real and whose betrayal was calculated, and the institutional world offers no framework for holding that person accountable. Every legal path is closed. Every official channel protects the guilty. The only tool capable of reaching the man responsible is the one Alban has spent his entire life refusing to become. The question is not whether the beast will be unleashed. The question is who will be in control when it is.
Malbête: Full Novel (Working Title)
Full-length novel continuing Alban's story.