Impure Blood

February 1, 2016
This engrossing first in a French police series from Morfoot (Burksey) introduces jazz-loving Capt. Paul Darac. As Nice prepares for the Tour de France, a Muslim lies dead on a street outside a prayer room. Did an elderly lady, Corinne Delage, administer a lethal injection and cause the man’s death? Is there a connection to the Sons and Daughters of Just Cause who are threatening the Tour de France? And what about the suspicious rent boy/bodybuilder, Imanol Esquebel, who’s connected to the deceased and possibly involved in a pedophile ring? As Darac and his team interrogate and track suspects as well as search for clues, his boss, Agnès Dantier, and her father, Vincent, a former top cop, are kidnapped. Morfoot neatly juggles all the various plot strands. Some marital troubles serve to flesh out Darac’s character. This breezy, entertaining crime novel features more fascinating police work than thrills, but it’s an auspicious debut for Darac. Agent: Ian Drury, Sheil Land Associates (U.K.).

February 15, 2016
Morfoot launches a new series by mixing international terrorism with threats much closer to home--and the home is Nice. Among the dozens of Muslims who've joined Hamid Toule's outdoor prayer group on Rue Verbier, one of them, a man in a white suit, isn't praying; he isn't even alive. It doesn't matter that no one but elderly Corinne Delage, who bumped into him with her trolley, approached him in the moments before his death, because Emil Florian, a literature teacher at the Lycee Mossette, was injected with a lethal dose of poison a good half-hour earlier. Things rapidly get more complicated for Capt. Paul Darac of the Brigade Criminelle de Nice. The dead man, who was carrying a bottle of drug-laced water, was apparently a pedophile. Meanwhile, the city's preparations for the Tour de France, whose cyclists are scheduled to ride through town on their second day, are threatened by a group calling itself the Sons and Daughters of the Just Cause. Not content to send menacing messages, the Sons and Daughters kidnap retiring Commissaire Agnes Dantier and her father, retired Commissaire Vincent Dantier. Suspecting that the motive behind all this mayhem may be more personal than political, Darac looks more closely into Vincent Dantier's past and soon finds secrets so doomy that they almost make him forget the abrupt departure of his lover, Angeline, who maintains that his only strategies for addressing problems are playing his guitar, making love, and punching someone. As subsequent developments show, she has a point. A sprawling, ambitious series debut especially noteworthy for its attention to minor characters, its mix of byways and felonies, and its determination to throw every crime in the book at the Brigade Criminelle--except, presumably, the ones reserved for the sequels.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016

Paul Darac is a captain in Nice's Brigade Criminelle. His team is called out when a dead man in a white suit is found on a mat outside a Muslim prayer center. The victim, local teacher Emile Florian, is not a Muslim. No one knows why he was at the place of worship. And, on top of everything else, the Nice leg of the Tour de France has been threatened by a terrorist group, the Sons and Daughters of the Just Cause. Darac's boss, Agnes Dantier, is involved with the security detail for the tour, as is Darac's lieutenant, Roland Granot. Everyone's attention is scattered among too many objectives and too many suspects, not to mention old hatreds and revenge. VERDICT British author Morfoot (Burksey) introduces a delightful example of the disenchanted French boulevardier. Darac plays jazz in nightclubs and shows up at crime scenes with little sleep and a certain je ne sais quoi. However, he also possesses an impeccable eye for spotting lies and ferreting out the truth, while keeping one step ahead of his interfering boss's boss, the public prosecutor.

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