Detective Lauriant Investigates: A Worldkrime Mystery : A Death in a Ditch and the Murder in the Vendee

Rating:
Summary: Hum-Drum Village Cozy
Review: This book is actually two smaller books in one. I must confess, I only read the first story ("A Death In A Ditch") and didn't enjoy it enough to proceed to the second tale ("The Murder in the Vendeé). Set in the early 1960s, the stories feature a title character, who is a gruff divorced Parisian police inspector. In "A Death In A Ditch", he is summoned by a colleague in the southwest to the fictional village of Saint Sauveur (no relation to the real village of similar name 30k north of Nice). Hoping to escape the dreary Parisian weather and spend a few days in the sun, he instead encounters never-ending rain and the murder of a German antique dealer. The mystery is essentially one of the small village cozy genre (think Agatha Christie), with a cast of about ten main suspects and witnesses. Lauriant is the outsider who must sift through the various intrigues, relationships, and town geography in order to discover the motive and means for the killing. The way he probes the locals and ultimately summons everyone to the hotel to unmask the killer is classic Hercule Poirot. It's not bad, just not that juicy or original either. And at the end, I was left wondering why the victim would have ever settled in the tiny village in the first place. The author also tries to weave in some sense of how French society was changing in the '60s, but it never really gets off the ground.