Review by New York Times Review
?? THE EAST TEXAS natives in Attica Locke's BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), Highway 59 is the lifeline that both links their towns and provides an escape route from them. Darren Mathews, a righteous Texas Ranger who comes from a deep-rooted family of black professional men, "men of stature and purpose," knows every truckstop hamlet from Laredo to Texarkana. But he is currently on suspension, and "without the badge, he was just a black man traveling the highway alone." Lawful or otherwise, Darren's help is needed up in Lark, where the bodies of a white woman and a black man were fished out of the muddy waters of the Attoyac Bayou. The town turns out to be a piñata of quirky characters, like the local sheriff, who lives in a replica of Monticello. (His dog lives in a replica of the White House.) Just about everyone in Lark patronizes Geneva Sweet's Sweets, a cafe that displays treasured objets like "Texas license plates going back 50 years." Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style. Given the characters in her novel, that voice comes naturally. Geneva's deceased husband, Joe "Petey Pie" Sweet, was a session man and "a devil on the guitar" who played with great bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Bobby "Blue" Bland. And every juice house and icehouse, as bars are known around here, loads up the jukebox with country blues. But there's also music in the private thoughts of a man like Darren. "He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead ... and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees." As for the murder mystery, it's tied up with buried feelings and secret betrayals that cross racial lines and go back generations. "There were things you just didn't do in Lark, Texas," Locke tells us. "And picking apart bloodlines was one of them." So enjoy your stay in Lark; but don't ask anyone "Who's your daddy?" and expect to get out of town alive. THE GREAT port of London is churning with activity in Anne Perry's latest Victorian mystery, AN ECHO OF MURDER (Ballantine, $28). On the lookout for trouble, Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police keeps his eyes peeled on the mighty ships passing through. But he isn't prepared for the gruesome scene of murder that greets him in a dockside warehouse. The horridly mutilated victim is a Hungarian merchant, one of a growing populace of displaced persons fleeing oppression in European cities like Budapest and Vienna, only to stir up antagonism in their new home. "They're different, that's all," says a newspaper dealer who bristles at all the "foreign newspapers." Perry fashions a rich, if bloodsplattered narrative from this chapter of history. As the murders continue, Monk and his clever wife, Hester, a nurse who saw plenty of savagery in the Crimea, struggle to fathom the new climate of hatred. "I think it's fear," Hester says. "It's fear of ideas, things that aren't the way you're used to. Everyone you don't understand because their language is different, their food, but above all their religion." How times haven't changed. PART POLICE PROCEDURAL and part travelogue, Cay Rademacher's MURDEROUS MISTRAL (Minotaur, $24.99) is a perfect getaway mystery. This tightly-plotted whodunit (briskly translated from the German by Peter Millar) uproots Capitaine Roger Blanc from his prestigious office in the Paris gendarmerie to the Midi, "the graveyard of any career," where he has inherited a run-down 18th-century stone house. Blanc soon finds out that "Parisian ruthlessness didn't quite work down here." Nor does Parisian pride, which gets clobbered when he starts interviewing slippery local suspects in the murder of an inept gangster. The detective-as-outsider convention works really well in humanizing Blanc, whom the elegant women in the district find especially amusing. The backbreaking restoration work earns him sympathy, as does his first exposure to the slashing winds of the region's infamous mistral. By the time Blanc is presented with his second murder case, he's ready to admit that his new home in the countryside is more stimulating than he'd thought. JULIA KELLER DOESN'T pull any punches in FAST FALLS THE NIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99). In the course of a single day, there are 33 overdoses (three of them fatal) in Aker's Gap, the Appalachian town in West Virginia where she sets all her regional mysteries. The putative cause of this horrendous business is a batch of tainted heroin - heroin being "as common as stray cats around here." But Bell Elkins, a county prosecutor and the protagonist in this series, knows that the problem goes deeper, to a "circular logic of despair" created by shuttered coal mines, exacerbated by zero replacement job options, and resulting in the kind of hopelessness from which there's no recovery. The plot pretty much consists of waiting for the next OD victim to keel over, but Keller does a terrific job of rubbing our faces in the troubles of her hometown - of America's hometowns. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 8, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Roger Blanc built an impressive record in the anticorruption unit of the Paris police, but the promotion he's expecting after uncovering a former trade minister's scheme turns out to be a transfer to a career wasteland: Gadet, in the south of France. Roger's new boss is unenthusiastic about taking on a Parisian castoff, and Roger's new partner, Tonon, appears to be a wine-soaked untouchable. Their first case bears the hallmarks of a standard Marseille drug killing; the victim's body was riddled with bullets and set ablaze. But before Roger and Tonon can hand the case off to the Marseille police, the victim is identified as local bully and thief Charles Moréas. The suspects are numerous: neighbors terrified by Moréas' bullying; the prominent builder Moréas argued with shortly before his death; and even Tonon, who's been obsessed with convicting Moréas of a decades-old robbery and murder. A subsequent murder finds Roger forced to wade into the region's treacherous political swamp. Readers will be as captivated by Rademacher's description of Blanc's adjustment to village life as they will by the well-constructed mystery. Highly recommended for fans of international crime fiction, especially Mark Pryor's Hugo Marston series and Peter Morfoot's Paul Darac procedurals.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Peter Mayle fans will welcome this promising series launch from German author Rademacher (The Murderer in Ruins). Solving a political corruption case earns Paris gendarme Roger Blanc a punitive transfer to the south of France. His wife remains in Paris with her lover as Blanc moves into a decrepit house in Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée and joins the tiny hamlet's police force. The resentful commandant partners him with Marius Tonon, an alcoholic underachiever obsessed with a 20-year-old killing. When the suspect from that case is discovered shot and burned in a garbage dump, Blanc and Tonon take on the investigation, supervised by a judge who happens to be the wife of the minister who arranged Blanc's transfer. As the seasonal mistral blows through the parched countryside, wounded hero Blanc and his unlikely sidekick navigate political and social minefields in pursuit of a ruthless killer. The appealing locale, pervaded by the scent of wild thyme, and the charming residents of Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée make up for some uneven pacing. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Capitaine Roger Blanc was a little too good in his anticorruption investigations and has been banished from Paris to the South of France. His marriage can't stand the strain, and he finds himself alone in a small Provençal village, living in a 200-year-old hovel. He's teamed with Lieutenant Tonon, a disgraced officer who comes in late and drinks on the job but knows the local politics. He also knows that a murder victim found shot and burned in the dump lived locally, and the two men now have a murder to solve. Even though the most judicious and politically astute action would be to close the case quickly, Blanc doesn't take shortcuts. When there's a second death, he ventures into dangerous territory, aware of the possibility that his actions could destroy his career. Rademacher, short-listed for the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger Award (for The Murderer in Ruins), has written a carefully plotted police procedural that vividly captures the landscape and scents of Provence while introducing Blanc and a small group of colleagues. -VERDICT The police action and political connections will attract fans of Jeffrey Siger's police novels set in Greece. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/17; library marketing.]-LH © Copyright 2017. 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
Criminal misdeeds turn out to be just as devious in charming Provence as in the mean streets of Paris.Shortly after exposing government corruption, Parisian police captain Roger Blanc is summoned by the minister of state and transferred to the south of France, effective immediately. Fortunately, Blanc inherited a house in Provence from his uncle a decade ago. The house is dilapidated, the local gendarmerie not much better. Blanc's new boss, Commandant Nicolas Nkoulou, is obsessed with tidiness and regulations, and his new partner, Marius Tonon, is mostly interested in chatting and maintaining his connections to the community. Also on the police staff is attractive tech expert Fabienne Souillard, with whom the divorced Blanc has an undeniable chemistry. Their first case together revolves around a corpse found near a garbage dump, burned and still smoking. Evidence suggests to Tonon that the victim is Charles Moras, a member of a notorious gang responsible for a spate of highway robberies and a target of police for years. In their meticulous probe, Blanc and Tonon talk to a skeptical judge, a droll German painter who lived next door to Moras, and the slick mayor, who wants nothing to overshadow the public relations rollout of an upcoming event. Solid leads are few and far between, though there is no dearth of suspects or, for that matter, shady behavior in paradise. When a prime suspect dies in a suspicious boating accident, who can doubt that the cases are connected? Rademacher (The Wolf Children, 2017, etc.) writes with quiet authority, methodically filling in pieces of the puzzle and laying a solid foundation for further clever whodunits with a strong supporting cast. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
