Death on the Marais

She was going to die. She could feel it, her life ebbing away as surely as fine sand through fingers. The thought caused her more sadness than fear; less a sense of foreboding than a cause to wonder what lay ahead. France, 1963. It’s a time of great change in France, not least for Inspector Lucas Rocco. Taken out of his home base of Clichy, Paris, as part of a nationwide ‘initiative’ to broaden police operations, he finds himself in the village of Poissons-Les-Marais, Picardie - and answerable to his former army CO now police Commissaire Francois Massin, last seen by Rocco cowering in a foxhole in Indochina. His new patch might be rural, but it’s certainly not uneventful. To begin with, he finds that hitting unexploded wartime ordnance with a hammer to harvest the metal for resale is something of a cottage industry. And when, on his first day, he finds a murdered woman wearing a Gestapo uniform lying in a British military cemetery, he knows life will be far from boring. When the body is removed by order of a magistrate from the police mortuary before Rocco can finish his investigation, he traces the paperwork to the dead woman’s father, war hero and big-time industrialist Philippe Bayer-Berbier. Yet Berbier denies that his daughter is dead. Following an attempt on one villager’s life and the disappearance of another, Rocco uncovers a series of connections with Berbier and his activities in the SOE and the wartime Resistance. In spite of an official wall of bureaucracy and a strained relationship with Massin, he sets out to uncover what has led to the woman’s death - and why Berbier will go to any lengths - even murder - to stop his investigation.