Brittany Mystery Series – serie

Summer in Brittany has carried into October, bringing warm, sunny days and balmy nights. For Commissaire Georges Dupin and his team, it also brings a heavy blow. Second inspector Kadeg’s aunt has passed away after being struck by a series of omens of death. And when Kadeg travels to the former abbey where his aunt lived, he’s attacked and critically injured.Determined to find out what happened, Dupin and his team head to the aunt’s estate on the Côte des Légendes. It’s a place that at any other time would be paradise. Dupin has always believed that monks always knew where to settle, in the most beautiful and safest of places. But the more the team looks into what happened at the former abbey, the more questions are uncovered, and the more secrets Kadeg’s family seems to have.

An August heat wave has all of Brittany in its grasp, and the only chance to cool down for Commissaire Georges Dupin is his daily swim in the ocean. Until one morning his routine is interrupted because a body has been found in the harbour with clear signs of foul play. Patric Provost was from one of the long-established families on the island of Belle-Île, Breton’s biggest and most famous island. Provost owned and operated a company dealing in an island delicacy: the famous Belle-Île-sheep. As Bretons say, the sheep season themselves while they’re eating, grazing on salty, iodine-rich meadows, full of wild herbs, directly by the ocean. In Dupin’s culinary ranking, this lamb comes right behind entrecôte. And that’s saying something.Dupin has barely stepped foot on the utopia-like island before it comes to light that Provost was not well liked. And someone was blackmailing him for one million euros, the deadline for payment the night before Provost’s body was caught on the buoy. Everyone on the island has a motive. Any one of them could be the killer.

The old salt farmers have always said that the violet scent of the Fleur de Sel at harvest time on the salt marshes of the Guérande Peninsula has been known to cause hallucinations. Commissaire Dupin also starts to believe this when he’s attacked out of the blue in the salt works.He had actually been looking forward to escaping his endless paperwork and taking a trip to the “white country” between the raging Atlantic Ocean and idyllic rivers. But when he starts snooping around mysterious barrels on behalf of Lilou Breval, a journalist friend, he finds himself unexpectedly under attack. The offender remains a mystery, and a short time later, Breval disappears without a trace. It is thanks to his secretary Nolwenn and the ambition of the prefect that Dupin is assigned to the case. But he won’t be working alone because Sylvaine Rose is the investigator responsible for the department - and she lives up to her name . . .What’s going on in the salt works? Dupin and Rose search feverishly for clues and stumble upon false alibis, massive conflicts of interest, personal feuds - and ancient Breton legends.