The Perfumer

Some perfumes make you smell beautiful. This one makes you wanted — and the wanting never stops.

Camille Moreau, twenty-nine, is the best nose in Grasse, France, and a mysterious collector has offered her fifty thousand euros to do the impossible: recreate "Nuit Ardente," a perfume last made sixty years ago, a scent that makes anyone who smells it desire the wearer beyond reason. The recipe survives. The flower does not — a rare night-blooming blossom that opens after midnight in the fields above the town, for one week in June.

Camille finds the flower. She makes the perfume. And then she learns the truth Henri Aubert scratched into his notes and never dared to say aloud: the scent does not create desire. It transfers the hunger of Solange Delacroix, the woman the perfume was first made for — a woman who died of that same hunger at twenty-nine, consumed by the wanting of a whole town.

Every person who desires Camille feeds the dead woman, and Solange is growing stronger inside her, learning to wear her skin. The only way to stop it is for Camille to wear the perfume herself and let the hunger take her — or to find someone whose desire is stronger than death.

A slow-burning tale of scent, hunger, and freely given desire, set in the perfume capital of the world — where the most dangerous thing a woman can wear is the scent of being wanted.

An erotic horror novel by Flor Nocturna.