Publisher Description
The long-awaited return of Timothy Williams, CWA award-winning grand master of crime fiction, whom The Observer named one of the “10 Best Modern European Crime Writers”
The sun-drenched Caribbean island of Guadeloupe is technically part of France, subject to French law and loyal to the French Republic. But in 1980, the scars of colonialism are still fresh, and ethnic tensions and political unrest seethe just below the surface of everyday life.
French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud relocated to this beautiful Caribbean island confident that she could make it her new home. But her day-to-day life is rife with frustration. Now she is assigned a murder case in which she is sure the chief suspect, an elderly ex-con named Hégésippe Bray, is a political scapegoat. Her superiors are dismissive of her efforts to prove Bray innocent, and to add insult to injury, Bray himself won’t even speak to her because she’s a woman. But she won’t give up, and Anne Marie’s investigations lead her into a complex tangle of injustice, domestic terrorists, broken hearts, and maybe even voodoo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After Big Italy (1996) and four earlier mysteries featuring Italian policeman Piero Trotti, Williams delivers a saga of dying French colonialism in 1980 Guadeloupe a story as convoluted as the racial strains afflicting the island's diverse, contentious population. French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud must evaluate the evidence against 83-year-old H g sippe Bray in the shooting death of Raymond Calais, a wealthy "B k " (a descendant of the original French colonists). Laveaud, who resists temptation and pressure to close her investigation, finds herself caught up in the welter of relations among the island's "negros, mulattos, Indians, whites," particularly the B k s, who make up the bulk of the business people and landowners. At issue are lucrative French subsidies and the potentially violent actions of the Guadeloupe independence movement. Laveaud, despite a strong sense of justice, is buffeted endlessly by the strong winds of change that engulf one mere murder, in this drawn-out tapestry of colonial misrule.
