Bernard Martin Mystery

A beautiful young woman is found murdered . . . and the clues to her death point to her spurned lover, Paul Cézanne. In this richly atmospheric novel, a mysterious young woman named Solange Vernet arrives in Aix-en-Provence with her lover, a Darwinian scholar named Charles Westbury, and a year later is found strangled in a quarry outside the city. The young and inexperienced magistrate, Bernard Martin, finds his investigation caught in the crossfires of a raging cultural debate. Initially assuming that Solange's murder was a simple crime de passion by either a jealous Cézanne or a betrayed Westbury, Bernard soon finds himself on a mission to unravel the secrets of Solange and Cezanne's hidden past. Exploring questions of science and religion that persist even to this day, Cezanne's Quarry is a provocative debut mystery about life, death, love, and art.

In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the murder of two Jews in Nancy reveals the darker side of human nature. In the wake of the Vernet murders in Aix-en-Provence, magistrate Bernard Martin moves to the town of Nancy in Lorraine, France, along with his pregnant wife Clarie, who is as fervent about Republican ideals as her husband. They are not in Nancy long when an infant boy is found dead, his tiny body mutilated. The wet nurse and mother say that this was a case of "ritual sacrifice" by a "wandering tinker," or Jew. Yet as Bernard delves deeper into the different personalities surrounding the case, he struggles to reconcile his Republican beliefs with the subtle nuances of Nancy's Jewish Diaspora, all while balancing the racial tensions and politics within the courthouse. Meanwhile his beloved Clarie, now reeling from the death of her own child, seems to be falling prey to the propaganda being spewed throughout town, forcing Bernard to acknowledge the frailties of the human psyche. Fearing a vigilante mob sparked by the church, Bernard must unveil the murderers before Nancy experiences her own pogrom.

In the third crime novel in the critically acclaimed Bernard Martin mystery series, young immigrant girls are disappearing into the depths of turn-of-the-century Paris. On a sultry night in June 1897, Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov, a young Russian, and two young women transport a dead man through the narrow streets of a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris. They throw the body into the canal and the girls flee to the Latin Quarter to hide with one of the Russian's anarchists "comrades." They do not realize they, too, are being watched. Their subsequent disappearance and the violent acts that follow will set Clarie Martin, a teacher, and mother of a toddler, and her husband, magistrate Bernard Martin (last seen in Cezanne's Quarry and The Blood of Lorraine) on a dangerous quest to rescue them from a vicious killer.