Bruno and the Satanic Murders

The Devil's Cave: A Bruno, Chief of Police, Novel by Martin Walker

Life is good for Bruno Courrèges, orphan and Chief of Police of St. Denis, in the beautiful Dordogne region of France. Easter is coming, the weather is pleasant, and this morning he has stopped by the 12th-century church to listen to the choir practice Bach's exquisite and ambitious St. Matthew Passion. When his phone vibrates, he reluctantly steps outside to take the call.

Young Julian Devenon, crossing the bridge to catch the train to his lycée, had been riveted by the sight of the beautiful naked woman lying face-up in a punt floating down the river. His father having confiscated his cell phone, the boy raced to the hotel to report the find, and opined that the woman might be dead.

Bruno races to the scene, then realizing he will need a waterman and boat to get the punt ashore, returns to the church. "You want my Jesus?" demands Father Sentout. Bruno and Antoine the Waterman race back to the river, the priest and entire choir trailing in their wake. The market and cafés empty as the townspeople realize something is afoot, so quite a procession follows Bruno through the streets to the riverbank.

Imaginative attempts to capture the boat––a fisherman makes a masterful cast but loses his tackle, and an unknown young man in Gatsby-esque tennis whites leaps from his car into the channel and nearly swamps the leaky punt––are unsuccessful, so Bruno and Antoine drive to his camp for a canoe.

The unknown woman in the punt is indeed dead, with a curious pentagram drawn on her chest. Also in the boat are a beheaded cockerel, black candles, and other signs of satanic rituals. A fire had been set in the boat, but it fortunately was drowned in the leaky craft. Cause of death is not immediately apparent to the coroner, so determination must await the pathologist's report. When it is discovered that the Lady's Chapel in nearby Devil's Cave has been vandalized, apparently during black rites, hysterical rumors of Satanism immediately spread throughout the village, fomented by the priest and the local newspaper. Father Sentout, at least, should know better, Bruno fumes quietly, but the proposed exorcism of the cave will certainly swell church attendance for awhile.

Bruno is surprised to be introduced to Lionel Foucher, that Gatsby-esque diver, in the office of Mayor Gerard Mangin. A group of investors headed by Foucher has been negotiating to build a first-class vacation resort nearby, and the mayor is furious, fearing that the publicity surrounding the recent apparent black magic will scare the investors and potential vacationers away. Nothing could be further from the truth; tourism at the cave immediately doubles and the town is overrun with reporters and tourists.

When Isabelle, Bruno's sometime lover, emails him from Paris to say she will be in St. Denis for a few days, she warns him laughingly that there will be a new man in her bedroom, and that she has a present from her and her boss, the Brigadier, head of the Paris office of the National Police. Bruno has been mourning the loss of his beloved hound Gigi, who was brutally butchered in the course of a previous case he shared with the National Police. While he desperately misses Gigi, he has not yet been able to bring himself to get another dog. He is both intrigued and disappointed by Isabelle's purposely vague messages; has he been replaced by a new lover?

It turns out that the murdered woman was the estranged daughter of a reclusive Resistance heroine affectionately called the Red Countess. The countess, now suffering from Alzheimer's, is being cared for at her château by her sister, Madame Montespan, and nurse Eugénie, who is also Foucher's lover and partner in the resort project. The complex plots of Walker's Bruno books often center on obscure bits of history or French law, but even for a Bruno book, the plot of The Devil's Cave gets a little convoluted!

This is Walker's fifth novel in the Bruno series, and I have enjoyed them all, less for the mysteries than for the setting and characters. His meticulous and sometimes humorous details of village life may make these books seem at first like cozies to a new reader. They are not, but are more sophisticated and darker. The French passion for politics at all levels (see two Frenchmen in a heated discussion and you can be sure that at least three political parties are represented) infuses all of these books, while the growing cast of characters is carried from book to book, giving the reader a real sense of familiarity with the village and its residents.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Devil's Cave, which will be released by Alfred A. Knopf under its Borzoi Books imprint on July 12, 2013. Portions of this review may appear on various review sites under my user names there.

Book Review of Gerald Jay's The Paris Directive

The Paris Directive by Gerald Jay

Like most longtime mystery readers, I feel an eager anticipation when I start the first book in a new series, wondering if it will be an introduction to a protagonist who will become like an old friend, revisited each year. In the case of The Paris Directive, just the listing of the first few chapters provided a frisson of excitement:

1. Berlin
2. Élysée Palace, Paris
3. Hotel Adlon, Berlin
4. L'Ermitage, Taziac
5. Frankfurt
6. Dordogne River
7. Café Valon, Taziac

Ah, looks like international intrigue; perhaps a political thriller. We begin by meeting Klaus Reiner, hired killer, whose cold efficiency, bland good looks and fluency in German, French and English have put him at the peak of his deadly profession, with the ability to choose the most lucrative contracts.

Reiner's newest assignment takes him to the fictional village of Taziac, in France's Dordogne region. The beautiful village in summer, with its cafés and restaurants, makes no impression on the all-business Reiner. He just wants to get the job done and move on, with the satisfaction of seeing an impressively large new deposit to his numbered account in Switzerland. But the hit goes wrong and Reiner has to take out four wealthy, middle-aged tourists, instead of just the one contracted for.

This is where our protagonist enters the scene. Paul Mazarelle, a former Paris police detective now living in Taziac, jumps on the case like a dog on a bone. Mazarelle had moved to Taziac, his young wife's home, when she became ill, and he is now a widower who doesn't know whether to make Taziac his permanent home or return to Paris. Mazarelle is a comfortably large, sympathetic and unassuming middle-aged man with a luxuriant mustache, who enjoys his pipe, good wine and food, and women. But, most of all, Mazarelle likes to sink his teeth into a meaty murder case.

Mazarelle's investigation quickly identifies a likely suspect, but he has some doubts about the neatness of the package presented to him, and digs deeper, mostly hampered rather than helped by his men, especially Dutoit, whose job qualifications include stupidity, laziness, insolence, racism and habitual abuse of suspects and witnesses. When a couple of the murder victims' daughter arrives from the U.S. to kibitz the investigation and further inflame the interest of the already-annoying journalists and gadflies who have descended on the town, Mazarelle's job becomes more complicated.

An intriguing cat-and-mouse game begins between Mazarelle and Reiner, which leads to a tense and dramatic climax. Readers who enjoy inverted mysteries (those in which the culprit is known; not a whodunnit) should enjoy this story––though it has some flaws, mostly in characterization. The reader doesn't get a good feel for what Mazarelle is really like. At first, he seems like a shrewd, avuncular investigator. But later actions belie that image and we don't read anything to reconcile the differences into a fuller understanding of a more complex character. Similarly, Reiner turns from a coldly calculating and controlled, intelligent hitman into something quite different, but with no convincing reasons given for the alteration.

Gerald Jay is a pseudonym. Whoever he is (one reader reviewer claims he is an attorney for JP Morgan Chase), despite these stumbles in characterization, his writing is assured and powerful, leading me to believe he must have some kind of writing experience. Jay is said to be at work on a new Mazarelle book. I'm hopeful that as we get to know Mazarelle better, he will become a friend we're pleased to welcome for an annual visit.

Note: I received a free advance copy of the book for review. It is scheduled for release by Knopf Doubleday on June 19. A version of this review appears on the Amazon product page, under my Amazon user name. The nature pictures in this post are from Gerald Jay's blogsite.