Murderous Mistral

Provence Mystery, Book 1

By: Cay Rademacher, Peter Millar - translator

Narrated by: Antony Ferguson

International Dagger Award short-listed author of The Murderer in Ruins, Cay Rademacher, delivers a beautifully atmospheric new story with a captivating main character in Murderous Mistral: A Provence Mystery.

Capitaine Roger Blanc, an investigator with the anticorruption unit of the French Gendarmerie, was a bit too successful in his investigations. He finds himself removed from Paris to the South of France, far away from political power. Or so it would seem.

The stress is too much for his marriage, and he attempts to manage the breakup while trying to settle into his new life in Provence in a 200-year-old half-ruined house. At the same time, Blanc is tasked with his first murder case: A man with no friends and a lot of enemies, an outsider, was found shot and burned. When a second man dies under suspicious circumstances in the quaint French countryside, the capitaine from Paris has to dig deep into the hidden, dark undersides of the Provence he never expected to see.

©2015 Cay Rademacher; translation copyright 2017 by Peter Millar (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Part police procedural and part travelogue, Cay Rademacher's Murderous Mistral is a perfect getaway mystery." ( The New York Times)

We aren't in Germany anymore.

I thought the German trilogy was great so I looked forward to this listen. Ugh, I was very disappointed. The characters were kind of thin and stereotypical. The great atmosphere in the German books was not replicated here. The story wasn't that interesting either. The narration was fine, but I'm not going forward with this series.

The Provence Mystery Book 1

The Murderous Mistral was a disappointment. I had finished Rademacher's three Chief Inspector Frank Stave mysteries that took place in war ruined Hamburg from 1945 to 1948 and was looking forward to the Provence Mysteries. I have finished the first story and found it mediocre. The story was okay, but not great. I was disappointed in the reader also. He did an adequate job reading the story, but again, not great when compared to the reader of the Frank Stave mysteries. He did not do as good changing his voice to suit the characters as the Stave reader did. In fact, he let his British accent creep into the dialogue of a couple minor French characters in the book.

Good police procedural

I thought there would be humor. If there was I missed it. The characters are good and the plot is good. Enough clues for the listener to realize where the story is pointing but not how it gets there.

Very enjoyable

Always nice to have a story set in a culture other than your own, with interesting characters and a good plot!