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The Messengers of Death
Pierre Magnan
#UD0292
Paperback, 311 pages; 2009 (2006)
$13.99
 Members' Price: $11.89
Someone is killing off the female descendents of the venerable Mellifl ore clan. As they fall victim one by one, each in their moldering villas, the retired Commissaire Laviolette is lured away from his Proust and his cats to help crack the case. The situation is increasingly bizarre: Strangers have been appearing in the nearby village of Barles wearing clothes from centuries past, but then again, the villagers see a lot of strange things (there’s the sight of the retired postman Emile Pencenat digging his own burial plot, just as an example). Laviolette must discern what, if anything, such goings-on have to do with the murders. In Pierre Magnan’s second mystery to be published in the United States, the visceral details of life in the forbidding Basses-Alpes region of Provence fascinate and his characters’ eccentricities bedevil until the last pages.
(BB)
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