Brought to you by D20 Media, The Crimes of Paris is a free audiobook written and performed by B. E. Hopkins, serialized in twenty-five half-hour episodes.

Casey Merkin is a fuck-up, he just doesn’t know it yet. Licking his wounds after the failure of his so-called “second marriage” in the States, he washes up in Paris—as always without a plan. There he meets Elena, a Cuban expat striving to reboot her career and salvage her marriage while struggling to raise a five-year-old daughter in a foreign country.

Drawn together by a shared sense of being lost in life, the two of them tumble headlong from friendship into adultery. As their passionate histoire d’amour leads them from a shabby bedroom north of Montmartre to the backstreets of Centro Habana, Elena and Casey discover a freedom, an honesty, and a depth of love they’ve never experienced before.

Yet despite all their promises never to lay claim to each other, the more Elena’s marriage strains beneath the weight of her deceptions, the more Casey wants it to break. But first he must convince Elena that neither she nor her daughter will be broken along the way.

The Crimes of Paris is an existentialist love story, a meditation on marriage and faithfulness, and an investigation into whether the misdeeds we commit in the name of love are ever truly justified.

Chapters

0:00 — Intro0:18 — Première Partie: Les Chroniques de Bruce0:41 — In Which I Meet Bruce8:20 — In Which I Take a Room on the Passage Brady16:27 — Chez Bruce21:58 — Le Passage Brady25:34 — Credits26:37 — Coming Next

Credits

Written and performed by B. E. HopkinsIntros and outros voiced by Lin Gothoni (lingothoni.com)Narrator audio engineering by Gordon Hall IVMusic and sound design from Envato ElementsAudio editing by B. E. Hopkins

The Crimes of Paris is a D20 Media production, © 2026 by D20 Media UG (haftungsbeschränkt).

To go beyond the book and learn more about B. E. Hopkins’s current projects and writerly obsessions, visit his Substack, Making Things Up, at behopkins.substack.com

If you enjoy this audiobook, tell a friend and please leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also support the author’s work on Substack or buy him a coffee at ko-fi.com/behopkins.

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