Review: DEATH IN BRITTANY, Christophe Villain

• 
  This edition an e-book from Amazon on Kindle
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FF9WLRPN 
  
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 23, 2025
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• Book 1 of 8 ‏ : ‎ Sandrine Perrot - The Brittany Mystery Series  
• Translated by Terry Laster 

Synopsis (Amazon)

Sandrine Perrot's investigation takes her from the picturesque fishing towns to the rural hinterland of Brittany's Emerald Coast.

Police Lieutenant Sandrine Perrot is on leave from her post in Paris and has settled in Cancale, the oyster capital of Brittany. She is temporarily assigned to the Saint-Malo police station for this case. The body of an unidentified woman is discovered on the Brittany coast path along the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.

With her new assistant, Adel Azarou, she takes on the investigation, which leads them to a cold case from Paris, but also deep into the tragic history of a venerable hotelier family.

This novel is a revised new translation of ‘Emerald Coast Murder’.

My Take

This appears to be a new publishing of a novel originally published in 2023. Essentially I think the plot must be the same.

Sandrine has left her post in Paris and is ostensibly on leave but is called in because there has been a murder victim discovered on a nearby coastal path. Sandrine appears to have left Paris under some sort of cloud and the person whom she has had some sort of altercation with turns up in Brittany and interferes with the investigation she is being asked to conduct. I thought here the author has tried to create too much mystery.

Too many times in this novel the author swaps the narration from third person to first person and vice versa. I'm not sure that that wasn't an error in translation. There are also instances where a verb is in the wrong tense. It also seemed to me that the author had a change of mind about the plot. The original mystery of who the dead woman is, and why she is in Brittany, is all explained and then the plot changes.

In the long run there is a sort of resolution at the end but I found the culprit a most unlikely selection - too old for what she is supposed to have done.

I will read the second in the series but I certainly hope it is not such hard work. 

My rating: 4.1

About the author

website

I am an author with a penchant for travelling to France, good food and exciting crime stories.
As a teenager, I regularly spent my holidays in our twin town in the south of France. After graduating, I worked for several years in Paris and along the Atlantic coast, from Calais to Biarritz. Since then, I have loved travelling and, above all, the excellent and varied cuisine that the country has to offer.
I write crime novels about France under the pseudonym Christophe Villain. 

So is Christophe Villain actually a German author? I'd like there to be a little less cloak and dagger about his real identity.