The Body in the Castle Well

After a young American's body is pulled from a castle well, Bruno, St. Denis chief of police in the Dordogne, begins an investigation that leads to the distinguished art historian with whom the woman was studying. Fourteenth in a series boasting nearly 400,000 copies sold across platforms.

March 11, 2019
The disappearance of American Claudia Muller, an art history student, drives Walker’s satisfying 14th outing for French chief of police Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges (after 2018’s A Taste for Vengeance). When Claudia’s body is found in a well in Bruno’s small town of St. Denis, the preliminary autopsy leads the authorities to believe her death was an accident. Drugs may have been a contributing factor. Claudia was studying with a noted art scholar who was possibly engaged in shady dealings related to his valuable art collection. She was also seen in the presence of a man recently released from prison. Was her death a simple misfortune or something more sinister? The book’s main strength is the intrepid Bruno, a horseback-riding and dog-loving master chef whose calm professional practicality pulls the reader into the well-developed, if familiar, crime story. Whether he’s preparing a gourmet dinner, enjoying a glass of wine, or solving a murder, it’s a pleasure to be in Bruno’s company. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Agency.

April 1, 2019
Lt. Bruno Courrèges asks how a visiting American student could have ended up in a well in the peaceful, yet strangely homicidal, Périgord village of St. Denis. All too soon after she's reported missing, Bruno finds Claudia Muller, an art history Ph.D. student at Yale, in a disused well in the courtyard of the Limeuil castle along with a cat who's lucky enough to still be alive. Did cat-loving Claudia climb into the inadequately protected well to rescue the animal and end up tumbling in herself? Was she impaired by the drugs in her system? Or did someone deliberately toss her in? Suspicion quickly focuses on two men: Laurent Darrignac, the falconer who met and befriended her the very day he was released from a 10-year prison sentence for killing three Boy Scouts in a drunken driving accident, and Pierre de Bourdeille, the legendary art expert with whom Claudia had been working. On the face of it, both choices seem impossible: Laurent, who professed sincere repentance for the accident that jailed him, had clearly been attached to Claudia, and it's not obvious how de Bourdeille, a 90-something-year-old disabled by the bullet that made him a hero of the Resistance and confined for years to a wheelchair, would have had either the temperament or the physical ability to commit the crime. But the case is complicated by the news that Claudia had questioned some of her mentor's attributions, striking at his formidable reputation, and de Bourdeille's plan to leave his collection to the town of St. Denis, depriving his longtime housekeeper, Nathalie Bonnet, of the inheritance she'd grown to expect. Walker weaves the details of Bruno's unruffled investigation together with all the obligatory social rituals fans of the series (A Taste for Vengeance, 2018, etc.) have come to expect. A detective story whose dramatic trajectory is marked less by its rising suspense than by the increasingly elaborate meals consumed by the hero, who prepares one of its most endearing menus for the sometime lover who's just spent the night with him.

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Starred review from May 1, 2019
Bruno Courr�ges, municipal policeman for the village of St. Denis and chief of police for the V�z�re Valley in France's Dordogne, has an enviable life, one that often starts with a morning horseback ride, continues with croissants at his favorite caf�, lunch with friends at a picturesque bistro, dinner consisting of locally sourced food from his own farm, and visits from women who are former lovers and still occasional bed partners. The mysteries that come his way don't upset his routine; in fact, Bruno's cozy web of friends and wide interests help solve them, often from something said at the weekly dinners he and his friends take turns hosting. In this, the twelfth entry in the Bruno, Chief of Police, series, Bruno learns from a friend that a young American woman, an art-history student visiting from Yale, has been discovered dead at the bottom of a well, just outside a castle where she'd attended a lecture. The girl's heavy use of opioids complicates the investigation: Was this murder or an accidental fall caused by an overdose? Adding to the interest is the fact that Bruno had known this woman for months (a flashback provides details about their friendly acquaintance). Martin always delivers a live-wire plot, well-realized characters (he's especially adept at character-revealing scenes), and an incredibly varied setting?this time, he throws in some expertise in medieval falconry. Another winner in an always-strong series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)