Madeleine Murders by
Elizabeth Cowley Tyler
pbk out July 98
(Minerva Press)
at £5.99
Set in the 1980s, this is the first of a projected series of mysteries featuring Inspector Henri Corbet of the Paris Police. Corbet is a cultured gourmet, a bachelor but by no means impervious to the charms of beautiful women.
“Everyone has his Vichy,” Corbet’s father once told him, meaning that everyone in France above a certain age has his version of what happened in World War II when France fell under German influence. Some Frenchmen were all too willing to collaborate with the enemy and not all of these paid the price after the war.
Vichy casts a dark shadow from the first chapter of this novel, which begins on the train from Bordeaux to Paris with an elderly man drinking tea and eating madeleines. But the tea has been laced with cyanide, and Francois de La Roche is soon in agony and dies before the train reaches Poitiers.
Corbet’s investigation, punctuated with mouth-watering menus, leads him into the lives of Vichy survivors and their families. Elizabeth Cowley Tyler shows how the past can cast a long, deep shadow into the present. The denouement tellingly illustrates the old truth that children reap what their parents have sown.
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
