BLACK DIAMOND by Martin Walker...excellent third mystery

BLACK DIAMOND (Bruno, Chief of Police #3)
MARTIN WALKER
Alfred A. Knopf
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The third installment in Martin Walker's delightful, internationally acclaimed series featuring Chief of Police Bruno.

Something dangerous is afoot in St. Denis. In the space of a few weeks, the normally sleepy village sees attacks on Vietnamese vendors, arson at a local Asian restaurant, subpar truffles from China smuggled into outgoing shipments at a nearby market—all of it threatening the Dordogne’s truffle trade, worth millions of dollars each year, and all of it spelling trouble for Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges, master chef, devoted oenophile, and, most important, beloved chief of police. When one of his hunting partners, a noted truffle expert, is murdered, Bruno’s investigation into the murky events unfolding around St. Denis becomes infinitely more complicated. His friend wasn’t just a connoisseur of French delicacies, he was a former high-profile intelligence agent—and someone wanted him dead.

As the strange crimes continue, Bruno’s detective work takes him from sunlit markets to dim cafés, from luxurious feasts to tense negotiations—from all of the paradisial pleasures of the region to its shadowy underworld—and reunites him with a lost love, an ambitious policewoman also assigned to the case. Filled with an abundance of food and wine (including, bien sûr, many, many truffles) and a soupçon of romance, Black Diamond is a deliciously entertaining concoction that delivers all the complexity and delights of the Dordogne itself.

My Review: I'd like to be clear about one thing up front: No one pays me to write my reviews, and I got no free copy of this book to review it. Save your nastygrams.

What I did get from this third outing in the Bruno, Chief of Police, series was a serious jones for truffes cendrillons (or cendrées, as I knew the dish), the coal-baked tarts filled with truffled foie gras that are outstandingly rich and almost incredibly expensive. They're also the only way I actually *like* truffles.

*pause for near-lethal drooling*

So. Anyway. Truffles are obscenely expensive fungi, and the Périgord (where fictional St-Denis is located) is one of Earth's best places to find the highest quality variety of them. Naturally, this being a Bruno story, the initial push into crime and dishonesty comes from shenanigans at the truffle market. Naturally, this being a Bruno story, the malfeasance and wrong-doing stretch farther and wider than that. Naturally, this being a Bruno story, there is loving and glorious detail lavished upon the preparation and eating of meals. A very great deal less attention is paid to Bruno's rugby-playing, fire-fighting physique in action amoureuse.

I'm down with that. Sex I can get anywhere. A series of mysteries where Pomerol *drool* is fleetingly mentioned and Dom Pérignon is casually served at a public function (!!!), where the meals are...so listen, I don't need to belabor this, it's effin' para-bloody-dise that Walker's describing. A hot rugby-playing 40-year-old cop who can cook and knows his wines. Yes please.

By the end of this entry in the series, it's clear that our lad is as always the bestest Boy Scout in all France and he's got not a single problem with doing the Right Thing even if it's political suicide, even when it costs him dearly and personally, and then refusing to dodge, bob, and weave when shady souls want him to trim his sails expediently.

For this very reason, Bruno ends this installment with a vastly better material life, and a very greatly enlarged circle of influence. Hobnobbing with royalty, even minor royalty, grants a man access to things previously not available. Very useful in a sleuth's development; and as done by Walker in this book, perfectly logical and in fact sort of inevitable.

I'll cut to the chase: For a series-mystery fan, this procedural-cum-cozy-via-thriller series is catnip and should not be resisted. For a foodie, it's madness to pass up. For one who fancies gentlemen of a certain interesting age, it's damn near mandatory reading. (My Gentleman Caller has a serious book-crush on Bruno, for example. I'm not jealous it says here because so do I.) And if wine interests you, for heavens' sake go NOW and buy them all!

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE, a series-starting delight

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE (Bruno, Chief of Police #1)
MARTIN WALKER
Vintage Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The first installment in a wonderful new series that follows the exploits of Benoît Courrèges, a policeman in a small French village where the rituals of the café still rule. Bruno—as he is affectionately nicknamed—may be the town’s only municipal policeman, but in the hearts and minds of its denizens, he is chief of police.

Bruno is a former soldier who has embraced the pleasures and slow rhythms of country life–living in his restored shepherd’s cottage; patronizing the weekly market; sparring with, and basically ignoring, the European Union bureaucrats from Brussels. He has a gun but never wears it; he has the power to arrest but never uses it. But then the murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army changes everything and galvanizes Bruno’s attention: the man was found with a swastika carved into his chest.

Because of the case’s potential political ramifications, a young policewoman is sent from Paris to aid Bruno with his investigation. The two immediately suspect militants from the anti-immigrant National Front, but when a visiting scholar helps to untangle the dead man’s past, Bruno’s suspicions turn toward a more complex motive. His investigation draws him into one of the darkest chapters of French history—World War II, a time of terror and betrayal that set brother against brother. Bruno soon discovers that even his seemingly perfect corner of la belle France is not exempt from that period’s sinister legacy.

Bruno, Chief of Police is deftly dark, mesmerizing, and totally engaging.

My Review: First in a series! Words to gladden a satisfied mystery reader’s heart. First in a cozy series set in a French village. First in a series featuring a male lead who loves kids, works his land and his job, has lovers (women, boringly enough), and commands the respect of his entire territory by being unflashily committed to justice, even when the law is in conflict with it.

Bruno is a very good man, one who did everything he could to save the life of the woman he loved in the Bosnian war, and still failed; he’s a damaged man, and he would be the first to say so; but he never once puts a foot wrong in dealing with the souls in his care. We meet him, in fact, helping the local farmers evade the stifling EU bureaucrats bent on enforcing health codes that simply don’t apply to the ancient market town of St-Denis. Any wonder everyone loves him?

So a murder occurs, one that Bruno can’t hope to handle solo: An elderly Algerian immigrant, veteran of the French Army and holder of the Croix de Guerre, appears to be the victim of a far-right racist hate crime. Things don’t look good for the town’s small Algerian community’s peace of mind, but the trail of evidence developed by Bruno with his colleagues from the various and confusingly similar French policing agencies lead them to an unexpected resolution to the crime. What makes that so satisfying isn’t that it was a surprise, which it was not about halfway into the book, but that it was handled with the tact, grace, and dedication to justice that make cozy mysteries satisfying.

There is food, there is wine, there is a dog, there are no cats...it is as if Walker went over my personal checklist and gave me all but one thing on it (Bruno’s straight). I’m okay with that. But most of all, Walker gave Bruno wonderful people to work with, people whose deep and dense roots are charmingly intertwined and wonderfully deftly worked into the narrative. Infodumps are rarely this good. It is a major plus for the series, always assuming it continues.

I can’t quite get to four stars for the book, though, because it’s atmospheric and delightful, but not quite suspenseful enough. The author tips his hand more than forty pages before the end of the book. Okay, yes, it’s a first mystery, but I think a little more care could have gone into the Big Reveal. It’s only a quarter star knockdown because the Big Reveal is a very very surprising facet of French history I hadn’t so much as heard tell of before, and that’s worth a lot of pleasure points. The red herring wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for either, leading nowhere a lot sooner than I would have expected. Again it was interesting, and it cast a bit of light on my idea of the EU’s cultural landscape from a new angle. But it was just this side of perfunctory in its use.

All the cavils aside, the book is a pleasure to read, and the series will be one I follow for at least a few more outings, possibly much longer.