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1960s: A minor Paris criminal is found stabbed in the neck on a country lane in Picardie
Rocco and the Nightingale
What you need to know before your trail
When a minor Paris criminal is found stabbed in the neck on a country lane in Picardie it looks like another case for Inspector Lucas Rocco.
As he gets involved however, he’s pulled off the case by his superiors who want him to watch over a Gabonese government minister, hiding out in France following a coup.
Meanwhile, Rocco discovers that there is a contract on his head taken out by an Algerian gang leader with a personal grudge against him.
Rocco is asking himself a lot of questions but it’s those who don’t want him to find the answers who should really concern him now.
Travel Guide
Picardie
Amiens is the capital of the region but at first Rocco was not happy about being posted here
“Back them, he’d been resentful at being posted to the town of Amiens as part of an initiative to ‘spread crime prevention and investigation procedures ‘ as one oInterior Ministry Suit had explained in the national press. As a long time city cop Rocco had made the mistake of assuming that nothing unusual ever happened in rural backwaters save for poaching, drinking-fuelled hunters shooting each other by accident and the occasional incident of assault and battery.
He couldn’t have been more wrong
This part of northern France, he’d quickly learned, had more than its fair share of violence and criminality lurking beneath its innocent, bucolic surface. Look beyond the rolling fields, roomy marshlands and tiny, scattered villages making up the patchwork of life just a few hours from Paris, and you’d find just as much greed, venality and plain out -fashioned blood lust as anywhere in the country.”
Turns out Picardie keeps his interest just as much as Paris and other parts of the country have done.
Streetview Maps
A) Amiens - Police station
E) Paris - Rue de Belleville
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
The fifth novel in the author’s Inspector Lucas Rocco series of crime thrillers but first to be published by The Dome Press. And I think they’re on to a winner! Here’s a detective who isn’t troubled and a drunk or in the midst of an affair and that was very refreshing for a start.
Rocco and his team are confronted with a series of problems from day one when a body is found on a rural French road. Then he’s taken off he case and put on another one. Of course, he starts to wonder why. I like that mindset -a bit like Columbo and his loose ends, always asking why – useful in a policeman of course!
Rocco carries on the case and it soon becomes clear that he is himself in danger. Quite a guy, as he doesn’t shirk from what he feels is right and even when it looks like those in power are involved in some way, he doesn’t let go. I admired that about him and the character worked well and developed well through the book. I was with him every step of the way even if I did want to say, er hang on a minute, do you really think…?”
This book stands out for me in the sea of crime fiction as Rocco is unique and relatively untroubled, he’s fresh and exciting and like a dog with a bone all in the days before DNA and modern techniques although it reads like a modern day with a hint of historical. Cosy it is not!
The setting really worked in this novel and added to the overall feel of the entire plot as had this been set in a city, it wouldn’t have had the same impact – I mean you don’t expect this level of dirty goings on in the middle of the French countryside do you?
There are more books in this series. Thank goodness! I’ve off back to (literary) France now to indulge
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Rocco and the Nightingale
Destination: Picardie, Amiens, Paris Author/Guide: Adrian Magson Departure Time: 1960s
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