An Island of Suspects
A Brittany Mystery
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- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
International bestselling author Jean-Luc Bannalec’s Commissaire Georges Dupin and his team head to Breton paradise in An Island of Suspects.
An August heat wave has all of Brittany in its grasp, and the only chance to cool down for Commissaire Georges Dupin is his daily swim in the ocean. Until one morning his routine is interrupted because a body has been found in the harbor with clear signs of foul play. Patric Provost was from one of the long-established families on the island of Belle-Île, Breton’s biggest and most famous island. Provost owned and operated a company dealing in an island delicacy: the famous Belle-Île-sheep. As Bretons say, the sheep season themselves while they’re eating, grazing on salty, iodine-rich meadows, full of wild herbs, directly by the ocean. In Dupin’s culinary ranking, this lamb comes right behind entrecôte. And that’s saying something.
Dupin has barely stepped foot on the utopia-like island before it comes to light that Provost was not well liked. And someone was blackmailing him for one million euros, the deadline for payment the night before Provost’s body was caught on the buoy. Everyone on the island has a motive. Any one of them could be the killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sturdy 10th installment in Bannalec's series featuring food-obsessed French detective Georges Dupin (after Death of a Master Chef) sets a locked-room mystery on an island off the Brittany coast. A body found on a navigation buoy is quickly identified as that of Patric Prevost, the wealthiest and most disagreeable resident of Belle-Île, famed for its needlelike rock formations that inspired Claude Monet. Dupin's initial questioning reveals Prevost to have been deeply unloved and alienated from others by his fortune. As Dupin digs further, the responses by Prevost's neighbors, tenants, and the island's mayor frustrate him. When Prevost's estate is totaled at $20 million, and it emerges that much of it is willed to the island's improvement, there's plenty of motive, but no obvious suspect. Then an islander is kidnapped, and Prevost's ex-wife is found strangled to death after making a frantic phone call for help. The mystery's satisfying solution ties neatly into the series's focus on food. While the pacing sometimes drags, with sidebars about Breton culture slowing the action, fans will enjoy Dupin's characteristically wry observations. It's a satisfying enough series entry.
