Présentation de l'éditeur
When you moved out of North London to a picturesque hamlet in the Dordogne no one said it would be like this in February: freezing cold, dark by mid-afternoon and so quiet. Members of the Caminade family keep dying in suspicious circumstances, and the doctor knows more about it than he's prepared to reveal. You're sure there's a murderer at large: could it be the Old Dutch Woman or her deranged son, or the Mad Englishman from over the hill, and could you be the next victim, maybe you're imagining things, maybe it's the whisky, but then what's that scratching sound coming from the other half of the house... The first in a series, Death in the Dordogne portrays a rural France very different from A Year in Provence and other saccharine tales of expatriate derring-do. It is an essential book for everyone planning a g?te holiday.
Extrait
Death in the Dordogne by Louis SandersLeadtext: There wasn't a sound except for the occasional cry of a bird. It was Saturday but no one was out shooting, perhaps out of respect for their neighbour. In these instances, you are neighbours even if you live several kilometres from the house that's been struck by death.At that time of year it is as oppressively wet in the Dordogne as it can be hot in July, but it keeps on raining until you think you will never see the sun again, that the cold season is the only one that really matters and that night will go on falling earlier and earlier every day. To make things worse, the images of the funeral vigil I'd just been to kept springing up in my mind.A pile of chopped wood by the side of the road reminded me of the circumstances of Gaston's death. He'd gone to find a particular piece of wood in a part of the forest that belonged to his family. He needed a long, sturdy beam because he'd got it into his head that he was going to restore the roof of one of the barns and, as wood was expensive, he'd naturally decided to go and cut down one of his own oaks. The Caminades didn't speak much, and he hadn't explained in detail his plan of action for the day. He'd left at dawn and still hadn't come home when night began to fall. Still nothing the following morning. They'd looked for him everywhere before calling the police. Eventually, he'd been found crushed under the oak tree, lifeless. Rumours and speculation had begun to spread, slowly at first in the hamlet, then in the nearby village and on into the towns of Thiviers and Nontron, in the cafés, because that's where gossip reaches a fever pitch on the subjects of sex and death. Shruggings of shoulders and raisings of eyebrows, grumblings and spreadings of hands had served as a eulogy for this peasant's son, a communist and an atheist who hadn't wanted a priest and who'd asked specifically for 'no flowers or wreaths' at his funeral. The tittle-tattle, the doubts and the suspicions had been encouraged by the fact that this wasn't the first Caminade son to meet a violent death.The eldest son, Louis, had disappeared ten or fifteen years earlier. He'd got drunk with a friend who'd driven him all the way to Angoulême, apparently for a party. A local peasant had seen them from his tractor as they got into a Renault 4, but he hadn't seen who was driving. Two days later a bloated body found floating in its underpants on a lake near Nontron was identified as Louis. He was assumed to have left the party blind drunk, to have gone for a swim, and to have drowned. Louis's friend was never found, neither was the Renault 4, and no one was even sure that they'd gone to Angoulême. After the news had been published in Sud-Ouest, that detail had somehow attached itself to the account - along with a number of others - in the commentaries inspired by pastis, calva and white wine in various cafés, or by pineau in the dark kitchens of people's homes all over the Dordogne.I decided not to think about it: the cries of the biblical mourner keeping her vigil over her son's body, and the crushing gloominess o
