Death in Bordeaux is the first volume in a trilogy of crime novels by the distinguished novelist Allan Massie. The book begins in 1940 with the discovery of a mutilated corpse near Bordeaux railway station, and Massie’s detective, Superintendent Lannes, immediately recognises the dead man as a former friend from university. Gaston Chambolley was homosexual and Lannes’s superiors are not overly concerned with what they assume to be a sex crime, leaving the detective to pursue an
unofficial investigation.
The dead man’s missing sister-in-law was a Spanish Republican and Lannes soon realises that the case is political, but the arrival of German troops in Bordeaux puts his job on the line. Massie’s evocation of France on the brink of invasion is vivid and convincing, and