iBookKindlePrintReviews

A Man's Head by Georges Simenon

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Translated by David Coward — Having accrued an incomplete collection of dog-eared, yellowed and slightly foxed editions of Simenon’s Maigret novels by scavenging second hand bookshops, Penguin’s project to reprint all 75 of them was music to my ears. This set is being translated afresh…
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Dog Will Have His Day

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The Three Evangelists appeared in English in 2006, and this is the long awaited sequel by Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, AKA Fred Vargas. The story opens with the bizarre discovery of a human toe bone in a random dog turd. Louis Kehlweiler is the sharp-eyed observer. He…
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The Lying-Down Room

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“I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles”, goes the old song. Certainly, the August heat is a trial for Chief Inspector Serge Morel as he tries to solve a puzzling and brutal series of murders. Not only is Morel finding the temperature a…
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Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst

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World War II is yet to start, but fascist forces in Germany and Italy are making ominous declarations, and General Franco’s nationalist army is fighting a civil war with the Spanish Republic. The Republic maintains fragile control over Madrid and Barcelona, but they are starved…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Lying-Down Room by Anna Jaquiery

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The Lying Down Room introduces us to the charismatic and dedicated Chief Inspector Serge Morel. The story opens in Paris in the stifling August heat, and Morel is called to examine a disturbing crime scene. An elderly woman has been brutally murdered to the soundtrack…
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The Dark Angel

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Paris. The present day. A bureau de change is robbed by a quartet of villains from a run down banlieue défavorisée. When the girlfriend of one of the crooks is brutally murdered, Lieutenant Jerome Barthelmy from the 10th arrondisement police becomes involved. His efforts to…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas

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Translated by Sian Reynolds — A four-time winner of the CWA International Dagger, Fred Vargas is arguably France’s finest contemporary crime writer. With every book, you enter a familiar fictional landscape that is not quite reality but rather a uniquely Gallic mélange of the whimsical,…
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