![]() ![]() And the unraveling of the mystery is spiced with humor, good food, great art and natural beauty. Daupin is enjoyable company, no less for his quirks (a love of penguins?) than for his genius. The author has practically written a travel guide and you can't read the book without wanting to visit Brittany. ![]() And the artist colony of Pont Aven will play a central roll in the crime when he is summoned to the neighboring town to investigate the murder of a terminally-ill hotelier. He is a loner, who maddeningly leaves even his own subordinates in the dark about what he's doing and thinking. Though the locals do not accept someone who's lived amongst them for such a short span to be a Breton, Daupin is happily ensconced in a setting where he can enjoy fine food and beautiful views. While, at least in this debut, we learn nothing of the reason for Daupin's banishment, the echoes of Inspector Montalbano, Hamish MacBeth and Simenon's Maigret seem quite intentional. The entire architecture of the novel, if not the series (?), is revealed right there. Gaugin once got himself into a brawl right outside after some sailors insulted his extremely young Javanese girlfriend. The rooms at the Amiral still had that wonderful atmosphere reminiscent of the nineteenth century when world-renowned artists, and then later Maigret, had stayed there. When we first meet Commissarie Dupin he is basking in the climate and beauty of the town of Concarneau, but we are apparently picking him up midstory:ĭaupin had spent his whole life amidst the glamour of Paris, but two years and seven months ago he had been 'relocated' to this remote backwater due to 'certain disputes' (as the internal memos had put it) and ever since then had drunk his petit cafe in the Amiral it was a ritual as delightful as it was inflexible. And, looking it up on Amazon, discovered it's not currently in print and the two used paperback copies available are priced over $60. Beaton and a boast of 700,000 copies sold worldwide, I'd never heard of the series. Despite a laudatory cover blurb from M.C. Turns out it was also first printed in German (the pseudonymous author's native language, then in French (where the novel is set), before Sorcha McDonagh rendered it in English. I recently found this book, in the Hesperus Nova print as Death in Pont-Aven, though it was also published as Death in Brittany.
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