... Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been busily writing book
2 in my Jacques Forêt series of stories. The book is complete and is in the final stages
of editing and I thought you might want to know a little more about it.
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| The old town of Mende |
Merle, like its predecessor, Messandrierre,
is set in the Cévennes in the south of France.
The title of this story is a real French word, unlike Messandrierre, which
is a corruption of the name of a real place.
It means blackbird, but it is also used as a girl’s Christian name and
as a surname. Capitaine Mathieu Merle,
being one famous, or perhaps more accurately, infamous holder of the surname. Mathieu Merle (1548-1587) was a Huguenot
captain who was feared during the religious wars in France. But he spent some time in Mende, the
préfecture city of the département of Lozère.
A city that features in this story and where my fictitious suburb of Merle is
located.
In Messandrierre, the story followed Jacques
as he unravelled a police investigation into the mysterious disappearances of
travellers to the tiny village of Messandrierre. At the end of that story, Jacques had a
decision to make and his love interest, Beth Samuels, had some serious thinking
of her own to do.
Merle begins a few months after the end of
the first book and...
Jacques
Forêt, a former gendarme turned investigator, delves into the murky world of
commercial sabotage – a place where people lie and misrepresent, and where
information is traded and used as a threat.
The Vaux organisation is losing contracts and money, and Jacques
is asked to undertake an internal investigation. As he works through the
complexity of all the evidence, he finds more than he bargained for, and his
own life is threatened.
When a body of a woman is found, it appears to be suicide. But as
the investigation takes another turn, Jacques suspects there is more to
it.
And here is a little taster from the very beginning
of the story.
la fête des morts
It was the tightly scrunched ball
of paper that captured the attention of Magistrate Bruno Pelletier. His trained
eyes swept around the room, only glancing at the naked body in the bath, and
came to rest once more on the small, ivory-white mass, challenging and silent
against the solid plain porcelain of the tiles. He stepped over the large pool
of dried blood, iron red against the white of the floor, and, with gloved
hands, he retrieved the object. Carefully prising the paper back into its
customary rectangular shape, he stared at the contents and frowned as he read
and re-read the single six-word sentence printed there.
“Je
sais ce que tu fais”
After a moment, he dropped it into
an evidence bag being held open for him by the pathologist.
all hallows’ eve,
2009
Merle is published on July 5th and is available for pre-order Merle
Roll on July 5th - I'm looking forward to reading more!
ReplyDeleteThanks Stephanie. There will be more info about Merle in another couple of weeks or so. Watch this space!
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