Death on the Marais (Inspector Lucas Rocco 1)

Magson, Adrian

ISBN 10: 0749008342 / ISBN 13: 9780749008345

Published by Allison & Busby Ltd, London, 2010

About this Item

First edition, first impression with full number line. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLACK PEN, ON TITLE PAGE. Some minuscule edge wear to top and jacket and spine, not price clipped (£19.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy, looks unread. 383pp. She was going to die. She could feel it, her life ebbing away as surely as fine sand through fingers. The thought caused her more sadness than fear, less a sense of foreboding than a cause to wonder what lay ahead. France, 1963. It's a time of great change in France, not least for Inspector Lucas Rocco. Taken out of his home base of Clichy, Paris as part of a nationwide 'initiative' to broaden police operations, he finds himself in the village of Poissons Les Marais, Picardie, and answerable to his former army CO now police Commissaire Francois Massin, last seen by Rocco cowering in a foxhole in Indochina. His new patch might be rural, but it's certainly not uneventful. To begin with, he finds that hitting unexploded wartime ordnance with a hammer to harvest the metal for resale is something of a cottage industry. And when, on his first day, he finds a murdered woman wearing a Gestapo uniform lying in a British military cemetery, he knows life will be far from boring. When the body is removed by order of a magistrate from the police mortuary before Rocco can finish his investigation, he traces the paperwork to the dead woman's father, war hero and big-time industrialist Philippe Bayer Berbier. Yet Berbier denies that his daughter is dead. Following an attempt on one villager's life and the disappearance of another, Rocco uncovers a series of connections with Berbier and his activities in the SOE and the wartime Resistance. In spite of an official wall of bureaucracy and a strained relationship with Massin, he sets out to uncover what has led to the woman's death, and why Berbier will go to any lengths, even murder to stop his investigation. Quite scarce signed.

Seller Inventory # 006889

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Death on the Marais (Inspector Lucas Rocco 1)
• Publisher: Allison & Busby Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0749008342
• ISBN 13: 9780749008345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

On his first day in the village of Poissons-Les-Marais, the last thing Inspector Lucas Rocco expects to find, in a British military cemetery, is the body of a murdered woman wearing a Gestapo officer’s uniform. When the murdered woman’s body is removed from the police mortuary on the authority of a Paris magistrate, Rocco traces the order back to the dead woman’s father, Philippe Bayer-Berbier, and realizes that Berbier has something to hide.

Following an attempt on one villager’s life and the disappearance of another, Rocco uncovers how each is connected to Berbier, and at the risk of his own life must find out which of them could have been involved with the woman’s murder.

About the Author

ADRIAN MAGSON began writing short fiction and features for women's magazines, contributing over the years to publications in the UK, US, Scandinavia, Japan and Australia. As well as writing comedy material and stories for BBC radio, he also turned to writing crime thrillers, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award. Since then he has gone on to have several crime thrillers published and is a regular contributor to Writing Magazine.