Verhängnisvolles Calès

CAY RADEMACHER
VERHÄNGNISVOLLES CALÈS /
FATEFUL CALÈS. A crime novel from Provence with Capitaine Roger Blanc
A Crime Novel, ca. 464 pages, Autumn 2019

More than 390,000 copies sold of the Capitaine Roger Blanc series

“This ingeniously orchestrated journey to the South of France stays exciting until the very end. Captain Cay Radmacher in best form.’ Annemarie Stoltenberg Kultur NDR on ‘Dangerous Côte Bleue‘

A dark family secret and a race against time - the 6th case for Capitaine Roger Blanc

Provence, a few days before Christmas. The days are clear but ice cold. The Christmas markets are crowded. And then, Capitaine Roger Blanc is called into the grottoes of Calès, a bleak valley in the middle of the mountainous Alpilles, with dozens of caves where people lived hundreds of years ago. After a rockfall, a skeleton has been discovered by an archaeologist. But this is not an ancient corpse. Embedded in in the front of its skull is a bullet. And it’s a female skeleton.
But even before Blanc and his colleagues can get their investigations properly started, they must respond to an emergency call. During a wedding party in the huge castle La Barben, not far from Calès, the daughter of the host has disappeared. That same night, Marius arrests the suspect who keeps denying that he abducted the girl, and the little one cannot be located. As the police are desperately trying to find Noëlle during the next few days, and to get a confession from the suspect, Blanc discovers that the dead woman from the grottoes is Noëlle’s long lost grandmother. Noëlle’s mother is also dead. She allegedly died in a car accident several years ago.
This means that Blanc starts to investigate in a completely different direction, very much to the annoyance of Marius and his other colleagues. He is looking for a perpetrator who has been persecuting the women of the family for decades. He digs deep down into a dark past – and discovers that many more people at La Barben castle may have had a good reason to make little Noëlle disappear forever.

Rights to previous titles of the series sold to: St. Martin’s Press (English World); Ediciones Maeva (Spanish World);