"They tear you apart... They leave no trace..."
Five years out of the Marseilles Judiciaire, Daniel Jacquot is happily retired, bringing up his two daughters on a beach in the Caribbean. But when an old friend pays an unexpected visit, retirement rapidly becomes a battle for survival...
"The girls didn't see the first shark... They didn't see the second or the third one either..."
"They tear you apart... They leave no trace..."
Five years out of the Marseilles Judiciaire, Daniel Jacquot is happily retired, bringing up his two daughters on a beach in the Caribbean. But when an old friend pays an unexpected visit, retirement rapidly becomes a battle for survival...
"The girls didn't see the first shark... They didn't see the second or the third one either..."
In 1972 a gold bullion convoy is hijacked in Marseilles. The security trucks and hijackers are swiftly rounded up, but a ton of gold has disappeared.
More than twenty years later, Daniel Jacquot receives an unexpected gift from an old fisherman. At the same time, a Marseilles lawyer called Claude Dupont receives an equally unexpected gift from a dying gangland boss.
When the Marseilles police become involved following a series of gruesome murders, the investigation is headed by Chief Inspector Isabelle Cassier. An old friend and sometime lover of Jacquot's, Isabelle discovers that the years haven't lessened her longing for the maverick Marseilles cop, and that her feelings for him are far from professional.
Together they embark on a cut-throat hunt for the gold, with hit-men from the Polineaux and Duclos clans hot on their heels. But after nearly thirty years, is the gold still there? And if it is, who will get to it first?
The Jacquot series is set in the 1990s – the years of Mitterand's and Chirac's presidencies – so there's no real emphasis on technology or advanced forensic science to crack the cases Jacquot finds himself involved in. Rather, it's bloodhound work, and he's the bloodhound – passionate, incorruptible, and often inspired.
It's also France with francs not euros, a golden age when you could smoke in a bar and Calvados didn't come with a health warning. Jacquot is not a drunk, but nor is he the kind of man who counts 'units'. What a horrible word. What a horrible concept. Jacquot would not approve.
MARTIN
BRIEN
O'
IN THE HOUSE OF THE LATE PETROU
A Story To Haunt You…
“Do you pray?”
“Ghosts don’t need to pray.”
“What do they need?”
“Always the same thing.”
“And what is that?”
“A second chance.”
“A second chance at what?”
“To put things right. To settle accounts.”
When journalist Electra Contalidis returns to her island home after a long illness she resolves to finish her biography of the nineteenth-century freedom fighter, Admiral Ioannis Contalidis, the family patriarch who built the house she lives in.
But it’s not this celebrated hero of the Greek War of Independence who fills her days, and haunts her dreams. It is someone else. Someone who hates the family she married into… Someone determined to have his revenge… And someone who sees in Electra the fragile, fractured means to his murderous ends.
Electra may find refuge and comfort in the past, but there is only pain and betrayal in her future.
In this modern Greek tragedy there is only one winner…
And he’s dead.