The crowded grave

Martin Walker, 1947-

Book - 2011

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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf c2011.
Language
English
Main Author
Martin Walker, 1947- (-)
Edition
1st U.S. ed
Item Description
"Originally published in Great Britain in slightly different form by Quercus Pub., London, in 2011"--T.p. verso.
Physical Description
313 p. : map ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780307700193
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

Ghosts have always roamed freely through James Lee Burke's haunting mysteries set in the Louisiana bayous and featuring Dave Robicheaux, a sheriff's deputy in Iberia Parish. "I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is," the Cajun detective says in CREOLE BELLE (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), referring to the ghosts of plantation slaves, Confederate soldiers and uprooted Acadians he sees in the watery mists. Robicheaux is in a New Orleans clinic recovering from gunshot wounds when a zydeco singer named Tee Jolie Melton appears to him with a Dr Pepper, an iPod filled with his favorite tunes, and a weird story about defective parts on an oil rig. In the real world, Tee Jolie hasn't been seen in months, but whether she's a morphine vision or an actual spook, she awakens Robicheaux's fury over the blowout of a well that has fouled the Gulf ecosystem, triggering one of his heartbroken laments for the unspoiled paradise of his youth. Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir - violent stories in which big strong men get all weepy about the ruination of their beloved home place and take vengeance on the predatory villains responsible for the devastation. To be sure, the destruction of a pristine natural environment is a thematic staple of the regional crime novel, but nobody can touch Burke in the lyrical expression of howling grief. With his history of "alcoholism, depression, violence and bloodshed," Robicheaux is the properly flawed hero for this tale of epic woe, which expands from oil-drilling disasters and missing singers to take in drug running, human trafficking, art forgery and Nazi war criminals. "I wanted to see the rain wash clean all the surfaces of the earth, as it did in Noah's time," Robicheaux declares. But if the rain won't come, blood will do just as well. For this, he turns to his sidekick, Clete Purcel, a mountain of a man who plays the avenger to Robicheaux's redeemer. The twist is that Clete has just discovered he has a daughter who may be the hired assassin gunning for him and his friends. "Had his seed produced a psychopath?" he wonders. That's an unsettling thought for someone who has Technicolor nightmares about all the bad things he's done, but a good question for a novel that shows how the sins of the fathers poison the ground their children walk on. The small towns where Martin Walker sets his enchanting country mysteries embody the sublime physical beauty and intractable political problems of the Dordogne region of France. Bruno Courrèges, the peaceable chief of police in the fictional village of St. Denis, would ideally spend his days tending his vineyard, coaching the local rugby team and cooking up fabulous feasts for his friends. But in THE CROWDED GRAVE (Knopf, $24.95), he has to contend with PETA militants tearing down the goose pens of local farmers and Basque terrorists provoked by a summit between France and Spain, not to mention the remains of a modern-day murder victim that turn up at an archaeological dig. But Bruno's biggest headache is the repressive new magistrate, a staunch foe of the hunt, a vegetarian and (quelle horreur!) a teetotaler who doesn't appreciate the hedonistic joys of his lovely valley. She'll learn. Could anyone be lonelier than a mother who's been ostracized by all the other mothers at her child's primary school? Louise Millar puts that onus on the heroine of her first novel, THE PLAYDATE (Emily Bestler/Atria, paper, $15), a disturbing psychological thriller that probes the insular lives of social misfits in a London suburb. The three women in this narrative have cause to be unhappy. Callie, whose little girl has a heart defect, can't break through the other parents' hostility toward an unemployed and insolvent single mother. Callie's best (indeed her only) friend, Suzy, the outgoing mom of three boys, has a high-earning mate and no money worries. But her husband neglects her, and being American is reason enough for her to get the cold shoulder. Debs, the pathologically antisocial older woman who has just moved onto their street, has a husband at home, but not in her bed. The balance of their social dynamic abruptly shifts when Callie returns to her old job, unwittingly posing a threat to her neighbors and endangering the life of her child. Christopher Brookmyre opens his new novel, WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED (Atlantic Monthly, $25), with a provocative line: "It didn't seem like Glasgow." And so it doesn't - at least not the Glasgow of his previous mysteries, which exist in some surreal universe where strange people are forever doing peculiar things. The main characters in this smartly written mainstream detective story aren't a bit odd. Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod is a respected officer whose job with the organized crime unit puts her in the middle of a nasty turf war between two local gangs. She has a quick wit and a tart tongue ("Plenty of people have to live in gangland. Just none of the gangsters"), but a failed actress named Jasmine Sharp is a better prospect for character development. Having dropped her studies after the death of her mother, Jasmine was rescued by her mother's cousin, who took her into his one-man detective firm and was training her in investigative work when he suddenly disappeared. Although Brookmyre deftly twists one case around the other, he hasn't quite figured out how to make his two players work as a team. A Cajun detective is haunted by ghosts of the Louisiana bayou.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 22, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review

Police Chief Bruno Courreges, of the small French town of St. Denis, has a lot on his plate here besides his lovely foie gras. There are PETA demonstrations against local farmers who raise geese; a recent body has turned up at an archaeological dig just before an important discovery is announced; the professor in charge of the dig then disappears; and a planned summit, fraught with security concerns, is about to take place between French and Spanish officials on an agreement about Basque terrorism. At the same time, Courreges' new magistrate, a feminist vegetarian who finds foie gras not just cruel but barbaric, joins forces with another local lawman in a vendetta against Bruno, who occasionally cuts corners to achieve humanitarian ends. The fourth installment in this series (after Black Diamond, 2011) is largely a lighthearted celebration of the Perigord region of France, up to its action-packed climax, but the damage and loss sustained there fail to dim the prevailing atmosphere of dappled sunlight and good food and wine and friends. A pleasure for Francophiles, oenophiles, and the palate.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The discovery at an archeological dig of a corpse dating back only to the 1980s, with a gunshot wound to the head, is but the first of several problems facing St. Denis police chief Bruno Courreges in Walker's appealing fourth mystery set in France's Perigord region (after 2011's Black Diamond). Bruno also has to worry about a potential terrorist threat to a high-profile meeting between French and Spanish officials in St. Denis. To make matters worse, the town's newly installed investigating magistrate is a stickler who takes health code violations seriously in a community where people often slaughter their own livestock, with or without a license. Finally, at a time when PETA activists are stirring up trouble, the magistrate launches a campaign against the sacred foie gras. Walker hits the sweet spot of balancing humor and drama, and his food descriptions will leave readers fantasizing about dining in the Perigord. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Felicity Bryan Associates. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Local police chief Bruno Courreges returns with his fourth case (after Black Diamond) set in France's bucolic Dordogne region. A beautiful spring day darkens when a dead body turns up at the local archaeological dig site. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/12.] (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A terrorist is introduced to Dordogne foie gras. St. Denis Chef de Police Benot "Bruno" Courrges (Black Diamond, 2011, etc.) has his hands full. An unidentified corpse shot some 20 years ago has been found at the site of an archaeological dig. Two of the foreign students there, Teddy and Kajte, may be involved in a case of animal-rights vandalism. And a secret summit meeting of Spanish and French ministers may be targeted by Basque terrorists. While Bruno's English girlfriend Pamela flies home to deal with her mother's stroke and her ex-husband, Bruno's former Paris-based girlfriend Isabelle, recovering from a wound inflicted on the job, returns to St. Denis with other governmental bigwigs to supervise the summit. PETA leaflets appear. Dynamite caches are rifled. A Spanish minister's car blows up. The German archaeology professor responsible for the dig disappears. Teddy and Kajte scamper off. Worse, the farmers raising ducks for foie gras loathe the new magistrate, who thinks eating the stuff is barbaric. Then clues to that old cadaver crop up, indicating ties to the SS, the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Army Faktion. Cover stories are uncovered. Good guys turn out to be bad. Bruno's longtime companion, a basset hound, dies a heroic death. And Bruno manages to deal with everything and still have time to make a mouthwatering lamb stew, savor a Perigord foie gras snack and enjoy a really nice glass or two of wine. Another delicious romp through a French menu garnished with politics.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Crowded Grave: A Mystery of the French Countryside By Martin Walker Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ISBN: 9780307700193 1 It felt like the first morning of spring. The early sun was chasing the mist from the wooded hollows that sheltered the small streams flowing busily down to the River Vézère. Drops of dew sparkled on the new buds that seemed to have appeared overnight on the bare trees. The air smelled somehow different, fresh and hopeful, and enlivened by the tuneful notes of a dozen different birdsongs. Excited by the change in scents and season, even after his early morning walk through the woods, Gigi the basset hound thrust his nose at the open window of the small police van that descended the steep and curving lane from his master's home. At the wheel, Bruno was singing a half-­remembered song about springtime in Paris. Vaguely thinking of the duties of the day that stretched before him, when rounding the last bend he was suddenly forced to brake. For the first time in his memory, the quiet road ahead was blocked with a line of cars and tractors, their engines running and their drivers' heads poking from windows. Some were out of their cars, looking at the road that led to St. Denis. Several were talking urgently into cell phones. In the distance a car horn sounded, swiftly joined by others in discordant chorus. As Bruno surveyed the scene his own phone began to ring. He checked the screen, recognized the name of Pierre, a neighbor who lived farther up the road. He ignored it, assuming Pierre would be calling to complain at being stuck in the jam ahead. There had to be an accident of some sort. Bruno pushed aside the thought that he could have avoided this delay if he'd stayed the night with Pamela, the English-woman he'd been seeing since the autumn. She had called off the arrangement that he would dine with her and stay the night, saying she'd finally secured an early morning appointment with the maréchal , the traveling farrier who was to reshoe her horses. Pamela postponed their meetings too frequently for Bruno's comfort, and he was never quite sure whether she was cooling on their relationship or simply wary of commitment. They were to meet again that evening, he reminded himself, without feeling greatly reassured. He parked the van and climbed out to investigate. The best view of the long traffic jam was commanded by Alain, who kept a dairy farm farther up the road to Les Eyzies. "Geese--­the road's full of ducks and geese," he called down to Bruno from his perch high on a tractor. "They're all over the place." Bruno heard the sound of rival honking as the geese called back in response to the car horns, and he quickly clambered up beside Alain to peer ahead. The traffic jam stretched as far up the road as he could see. Darting between the stalled cars were perhaps hundreds of ducks and geese, streaming through the woods on the side of the road and heading across it to settle in a broad pond that spread across the meadow, swollen by the spring rains. "That's Louis Villatte's farm, behind those woods," said Alain. "A tree must have come down and broken his fence, let them all escape. There's over three thousand birds in there. Or rather, there used to be. Looks like he's lost a few to the cars too." "Have you got his number?" Bruno asked. Alain nodded. "Call him, see if he knows his birds have escaped. Then go through those woods and see if you can help Louis block the gap in his fence. I'll try and sort this out here. Join you later." Bruno went back to his van, released Gigi, and walked with him down the road, brushing aside the drivers' angry queries. A driver he knew was looking mournfully at a broken headlamp while a wounded goose lay half pinned under his car, honking feebly. "You grew up on a farm, Pierre," Bruno told him, rushing past. "Put the poor devil out of its misery." Looking back, he saw Pierre bend to grip the goose behind its head and twist. The bird fluttered wildly and then went limp. Even when the farm boy grew up like Pierre to work in an accountant's office, he hadn't lost the skill. When he came to the main grouping of birds, advancing in a jumbled column from the woods, Bruno saw that the road ahead was blocked by some stalled cars coming the other way. He briefly considered using Gigi to turn the birds back, but they would go off and cross the road elsewhere. There was no stopping this exodus, so he might as well try to speed it up and clear the road. He persuaded the leading cars in each queue to reverse a little to make a broader passage to let the birds pass freely across to the pond. Some drivers tried to argue, but he pointed out that the sooner he could stop the supply of ducks, the sooner the road would unblock. He left them grumbling and took Gigi into the trees, trotting past the trail of ducks and geese that was still pottering and waddling its way from the Villatte farm. Bruno smiled to himself, wondering if the birds felt a sense of escape or curiosity, of adventure triggered by the coming of springtime. Louis and his wife were already at the huge hole torn in the fence. No tree had fallen, no tractor had ridden through the sturdy barrier of wooden posts and chicken wire that ringed the farm. Instead, whole fence posts had been hauled from the earth and the wire cut. With boards and old doors and cardboard boxes stuffed beneath an ancient tractor, Louis was trying to plug the gaps in the fence. His wife and eldest son were flapping their arms, and their dog was barking to shoo away the ducks and geese following their fellows toward the freedom of the woods. Without being told, Gigi darted forward to help drive the birds back from the fence, and Bruno helped Alain to haul some branches from broken trees to seal the remaining gaps in the wire. Once the makeshift barrier was in place, Louis came forward to shake their hands. Gigi and Louis's dog sniffed politely at each other's tails and then sat beside each other, staring at any bird daring to approach. "We've been at this since daybreak," Louis said. "You see how big this gap is? Some bastard ripped this fence down deliberately and did a good job of it." "And we know who," added Sandrine, his wife. "Look at this, stuck on the bits of the fence they didn't tear down." She handed Bruno a photocopied leaflet, sealed inside a transparent plastic envelope. "STOP cruelty to animals. Boycott foie gras," he read. There was a smudged photocopied image of a duck held down in a narrow cage. A flexible tube hanging from above was thrust into its mouth by an unidentified man who was stretching the duck's neck taut for the force-­feeding. At the bottom, it read " Contactez PETAFrance.com ." "Who's this PETA?" asked Alain, peering over Bruno's shoulder. "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," said Bruno. "It's an American thing, maybe British, but it's growing in France. They made a big fuss up in Paris about battery chickens and veal, those calves kept in pens. Looks like they've started running a campaign against foie gras." "But that's our livelihood," said Sandrine. "And we don't make foie gras, we just raise the birds." "And look at this," said Louis. "The wire's been cut with proper cutters. This was organized." He showed Bruno the snipped strands of wire. "Then they pulled it away somewhere, hiding the stretches of wire they cut. I sent the other boy out looking for it in the woods." "City bastards," grunted Alain. "Don't know the first thing about the country and they come here like a bunch of terrorists and try to ruin people." He turned aside and spat. "You find out who they are, Bruno, and we'll take care of the rest." Bruno ignored Alain's outrage on behalf of his fellow farmer. "All the birds seem to be heading for that pond on the far side of the road," he told Louis. "Have you got some way to round them up and bring them back?" "I'll ring the food bell. That brings most of them running. And for the rest, I've got some netting. That's how we usually round them up. I'll put them in the trailer and bring them back once I've got this fence fixed." "Sooner the better, because they've blocked the whole road into town," said Bruno. "That's what brought me here." "Crazy birds," said Louis, grimacing in rueful affection. "They've got a perfectly good pond back in the field, but give them a sniff of someplace new and off they go." He gestured back beyond his house where already some of the ducks, frustrated at their efforts to escape through the newly sealed barrier, were splashing and paddling serenely in their old familiar pond. A young boy of about ten labored toward them from the woods, proudly hauling a section of wire fence. "I found it, Papa," he shouted. "And there's more. I can show you where." His face broke into a grin at seeing Bruno, who taught him to play rugby in winter and tennis in summer. "Bonjour, Monsieur Bruno." He dropped the fence and came forward to shake hands. "Bonjour, Daniel. Did you see or hear anything when this happened?" "Nothing. The first I heard was when Papa woke us all up to come out and save the birds." "I heard something, a duck call, a single one and then repeated, just before the cockerel started," said Louis. "So it must have been a bit before dawn. I remember thinking that's odd, because the ducks don't usually stir until after the hens." "Could it have been a lure, one of those hunter's calls?" Bruno asked. "Whoever cut the fence must have had some way to wake the birds and tempt them to move. They'd have wanted them out before you and the family were awake." "It must have been something like that," Sandrine said. "The birds tend to stick around the barn, waiting to be fed. They've never gone off before, even when we had that storm that knocked part of the fence down." "I'd better get back to the road and see that jam is cleared," said Bruno. "Before you go, what do you know about this PETA?" asked Sandrine. "Not a lot, but I'll find out," Bruno replied. "I think you've lost one or two birds to the cars, but not many." "Those birds are worth six euros each to us," said Sandrine. "We can't afford to lose any of them, what with the bank loan we have to pay until we sell this lot. What if those PETA people come again?" "I'll shoot the bastards," Louis said. "We'll take turns keeping watch, sit up all night if we have to." "You have a right to protect your property with reasonable force, according to the law," said Bruno. "But people interpret 'reasonable force' in different ways. If you hear anything happening again, it's best you call me. Whatever you do, don't use a firearm or any kind of weapon. The best thing is to photograph them so we can identify who they are. If you have any lights you can rig up, or one of those motion detectors . . ." "A camera won't do any good," said Alain. "Even with photos the damn courts will take their side. They're all mad Greenies, the magistrates. Then there's those food inspectors and all the other rules and regulations, tying us up in knots." "I think I know who it is," said Sandrine. "It's those students at the archaeology site who came in last week, working on some dig with that German professor, over toward Campagne. They're all staying at the municipal campground. This time of year, they're the only strangers around here and you know what those students are like. They're all Greens now." Bruno nodded. "I'll check it out. See you later." Along the fence he saw the fluttering of another of the leaflets inside a plastic bag, one of the kind that could be sealed and used in freezers. He took out a handkerchief and gingerly removed the pins that held it to the wire. Forensics might get something from it. There were several more attached along the fence and he took another. He nodded at Alain. "Do you want to come with me? You'll have to move your tractor." As he reached the road, where the jam was steadily clearing itself, Bruno's phone rang again. He checked the screen, saw the name "Horst," and this time he answered. Horst Vogelstern was the German professor of archaeology in charge of the student volunteers at the dig. For more than twenty years Horst had spent his vacations at a small house he owned on the outskirts of St. Denis. He ran digs in the Vézère Valley that the local tourist board liked to proclaim as the cradle of prehistoric man. The first site of Cro-­Magnon man had been found in the valley over a hundred years earlier, and the famous cave paintings of Lascaux were farther up the river. It was a source of pride to Bruno that he lived in this valley that could claim the longest continuous human habitation of anywhere on earth. Bruno had attended a couple of Horst's lectures, delivered in excellent if strongly accented French. He had visited his digs and read a couple of articles Horst had published in the popular monthly Dossiers d'Archéologie . Normally a quiet man, Horst became passionate when he talked of his subject, the great mystery of the replacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro-­Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Had it been violent? Did they interbreed? Were the Neanderthals wiped out by some plague or disease? It was, said Horst, the crucial question regarding our human origins. Whenever Horst spoke, Bruno caught a sense of the excitement that gripped the scholar. "Horst," he answered. "How are you? I was just on my way to see you at the dig." "Good, we need you here right away. And you had better bring a doctor with you. We've found a body." "Congratulations. Isn't that what you wanted to find?" "Yes, yes, but I want skeletons from the distant past. This one is wearing a St. Christopher medal around his neck and I think he's also wearing a Swatch. This is your department, Bruno, not mine." Excerpted from The Crowded Grave: A Mystery of the French Countryside by Martin Walker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from The Crowded Grave: A Mystery of the French Countryside by Martin Walker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.