Deadly Camargue

September 3, 2018
Rademacher’s enjoyable second Provence mystery (after 2017’s Murderous Mistral) finds Capt. Roger Blanc on a road where a bicyclist died horribly, gored by a fighting bull that escaped its corral, in the Camargue region of southern France during a summer heat wave. The dogged investigating of Blanc, a Parisian cop banished to the sleepy provinces for angering senior bureaucrats, reveals that the bull was let out on purpose; the bull’s victim, prominent journalist Albert Cohen, was the target. The detective soon connects the crime with the theft of a van Gogh painting from a provincial museum and the 1980s killing of a local landowner by militant leftists. These discoveries don’t endear Blanc to his local boss. At times, Blanc can be his own worst enemy, since he’s having an affair with the wife of his biggest foe in Paris. Rademacher’s vivid descriptions of the landscape, the pleasures of French food, and the history of van Gogh’s time in the south add to the story’s appeal. Armchair travelers will be rewarded.

September 15, 2018
The rural beauty of Provence masks layers of deception and intrigue.Police captain Roger Blanc, abruptly exiled from Paris, has made some headway with the stubborn provincials in his new district (Murderous Mistral, 2017), but their obstinacy is slow to dissipate. When an escaped bull gores a man to death in the Camargue, a rugged region in Blanc's new bailiwick, he's called to investigate. Blanc's suspicion that he faces a case of murder comes up against local skepticism. Even his partner, Marius Tonon, believes the death was an accident. The bull's breeder, Aurélien Ferréol, insists that the gate to the meadow where the bull was kept was always locked. The victim, Albert Cohen, was a high-profile journalist and TV pundit with a history of cocaine abuse. At the time of his death, Cohen, who already had many enemies, was working on an especially scandalous new story. Blanc's investigation proceeds slowly, the better to spar verbally with intransigent locals and disdainful acquaintances of the victim. A break in the case comes via a "bicycle bullfighter." His speculations take Blanc away from his initial theory of the crime, revenge for Cohen's published work, and introduce a new array of suspects. He encounters shaky alibis, nasty collectors, and jealous scholars before cracking the case.The leisurely journey to the solution of Rademacher's second Provence whodunit is adorned with droll characterizations, pungent dialogue, and zingy chapter titles.

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October 15, 2018
Clearly, Captain Roger Blanc's nose for sniffing out political cases hasn't suffered from his banishment from Paris to rural Gadet (Murderous Mistral?, 2017). Fresh from outing a corrupt local politician in his first Gadet case, Blanc is called to the scene of a questionable death in the Camargue wetlands. Celebrity journalist Albert Cohen has been gored by one of the Camargue's renowned fighting bulls. The last thing Blanc's boss, Nkoulou, wants is another high-profile investigation, especially one involving a politically connected muckraker. But Blanc's gut insists that someone unleashed the bull on Cohen, especially after discovering that Cohen was investigating the unsolved theft of a local museum's Van Gogh. Blanc unrepentantly abandons gendarmerie protocol and unearths motives swirling around a renowned art historian, Cohen's publisher's socialite wife, and a leftist terror group from the eighties. Bearing only limited resemblance to the Europe we think we know, Rademacher's French setting makes an intriguing backdrop to Blanc's dogged, self-sabotaging war against corruption. A fantastic read for fans of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)