Top notch historical literary police procedural, although the proof-reading leaves a lot to be desired. The first in a trilogy, this is set in 1940s Bordeaux, during the fall of France. Superintendent Lannes, a veteran of the Great War and with a son on the front lines of the coming war, investigates the grisly murder of a homosexual. He is urged to close the case quickly, but the victim was known to him and he hangs on, doggedly pursuing the slender lines of inquiry. When Germany invades and France surrenders, he finds himself questioning his priorities and fearing for the future. His chief suspects become powerful and untouchable,his witnesses are in danger and he is vulnerable. In the end, the mystery might be solved and the culprits revealed, but is there any hope of justice being done?

Underneath the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and typesetting disasters, this book is superbly written and sympathetically imagined, a portrait of a society about to compromise itself utterly while those within struggle to find ways to live with themselves and their conquerors. One senses that the other jackboots will well and truly drop in the next volume, and horrible choices about resistance and survival will have to be made and that both will come with heavy costs.