Death in the Vines

April 15, 2013
Longworth throws a variety of puzzles at investigating magistrate Antoine Verlaque and his significant other, law professor Marine Bonnet, in their enjoyable third outing (after 2012’s Murder in the Rue Dumas). A few hours after Pauline d’Arras—an older woman who may be displaying the onset of Alzheimer’s—disappears, her frantic husband shows up at police headquarters in Aix-en-Provence. In addition, an inventory of an always-locked wine cellar, part of a winery where a police official’s wife works, reveals that someone has been looting the cellar of its most precious contents. Finally, a 28-year-old bank employee, Suzanne Montmory, is raped and severely beaten. Two of the mysteries end up involving murder, and it falls to Verlaque and Bonnet to track down the killer or killers responsible. The solutions are less interesting than the byplay between the leads, but the book’s real strength is its evocation of place. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

April 15, 2013
Aix and the Provence countryside provide a variety of vexations for examining magistrate Antoine Verlaque (Death at the Chateau Bremont, 2011, etc.). First it was the wine at Domaine Beauclaire. Owner Olivier Bonnard reports dozens of bottles have disappeared, some very rare and valuable. Then Gilles d'Arras reports that when he arrived home at 12:30, his wife Pauline was missing--missing!--after having met him for lunch every day for 42 years. Between a trip to Paris to consult retired wine thief Hippolyte Thebaud and a delay caused by a suicide on the TGV line, there's hardly time to investigate the rape and beating of bank clerk Suzanne Montmory. When Suzanne dies of her injuries, Verlaque and police commissioner Bruno Paulik interview her co-workers at the Bank of Provence in eguilles. Still, their investigation stalls despite the best efforts of their bright young colleagues, Alain Flamant and Jules Schoelcher. Verlaque is so overwhelmed that he doesn't even notice that his partner, law professor Marine Bonnet, has grown detached and pensive. It takes a visit to the missing Pauline's sister Clothide in a cloister near Narbonne to force Verlaque to confront the ghosts of his past that cast shadows on his relationship with Marine. And it takes a second and even a third death to prompt Verlaque and Paulik to close the book on Aix's crime spree. Longworth loses some of her focus in her tangled third, whose plot twists as capriciously as Bonnard's vines.

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June 1, 2013

A gentle and captivating series' third entry (after Murder in the Rue Dumas) sends Judge Antoine Verlaque and professor Marine Bonnet into the vineyards and beyond when three murders appear to be linked.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
This mystery set in Aix-en-Provence, the third in Longworth's Verlaque and Bonnet series, starts with the owner of a renowned winery in Provence realizing that many bottles of wine, some dating as far back as 1929, have been stolen from his cellar. He tries to settle down by touching an ancient object that has comforted him from the time he was a boy, an aquatic fossil in the form of a scallop shell, embedded in the cellar wall. Longworth's description of this vineyard fossil, common in an area once under the deep sea, and her characterizations of the qualities of different wines are the kind of details that make this series riveting, along with the quirky characters of Aix-en-Provence judge Antoine Verlaque; his girlfriend and co-sleuth, law professor Marine Bonnet; and Police Commissioner Bruno Paulik. But these kinds of enlivening details are, unfortunately, much scarcer here than in the previous two Verlaque and Bonnet stories. The plot, involving murder and grievous bodily harm to several women, is the strong point this time. Not quite as entrancing as earlier series entries but still satisfying for fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)