A GRAVE IN THE WOODS

Relax. All the deceased in police chief Bruno Courrèges’ latest case have been dead for a long time. But that doesn’t mean there’s no mystery about them.

Bruno returns from medical leave to his office, which has been commandeered by Colette Cantagnac, his overbearing new executive administrator, just in time to hear that English ex-chef Tim Birch and his wife, Krys, want to purchase a vacant hotel, the Domaine de la Barde, and refit it as a cooking school. It sounds like a win-win for everyone, but there’s one problem: what to do about the neglected grave on the building’s grounds. A quick excavation in the presence of visiting American archaeologist Abigail Howard reveals a dog buried there; a deeper dig discloses three human skeletons—two naked females and one fully clothed male. The women are pretty clearly Luftwaffe officers Anna-Liese Weber and Hannalore Franke, who died in 1944, but it’s not at all clear how the man can really be Italian captain Salvatore Todaro, whose identification papers he carries, since Todaro was killed in 1942 on board the submarine he commanded. By the time this third corpse is properly identified, the brew will include other complications: attempted cyberattacks on Bruno and others, the threat of some once-in-a-lifetime floods, and the difficulties in both establishing the truth of what happened back in 1944 and what the French, Italian, British, and American authorities who are involved can do about it now. The questions Walker raises about the wartime foundations of the comfortable social fabric and rituals Bruno and his friends in St. Denis take for granted are so ambitious that it’s no great surprise that they’re more compelling than their answers.

An overstuffed memorial to the days of World War II.