In the 12th outing for Walker's Chief Bruno, (after A Taste for Vengeance) we find him enjoying his small-town life in southwest France. Busily planning the town's summer events, he is called away to look for a missing American graduate student who didn't return home from a lecture at the local hilltop castle ruins-turned-park. It's Bruno who notices the cover is missing from the well being repaired and who goes down to look. The deceased young woman was studying French Renaissance art with the famous local art historian, who had been crippled as a Resistance member during the war by a collaborator. Her father is also close friends with the U.S. president, so Bruno and his colleagues receive a lot more scrutiny than usual. Yet he still finds time while solving the murder to plan a Josephine Baker tribute concert, learn about falconry, exercise his horse and basset hound, and cook regional dishes such as a red onion tarte tatin and a navarin of lamb. He also enjoys time with friends and inspects the fine local wines and the famous pate de Perigueux. VERDICT This will satisfy fans of the series, and also those who enjoy intricate mysteries in unique settings with plenty of local details.--Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green

the LOS angeles of James Ellroy's latest historical thriller, THIS storm (Knopf, $29.95), is the kind of place where rats as big as cats fearlessly scoot across the front porch, where lovers rendezvous in welcoming Tijuana, anonymous among the "child-beggar swarms" and "cat-meat taco vendors," and where sentiments of pure, undiluted venom ("Hate, hate, hate. Kill, kill, kill") express the prevailing state of race relations. We're talking about the Los Angeles of January 1942, when a New Year's Eve broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin laments that his warbattered listeners must stand shoulder to shoulder with the "rape-happy Russian Reds" in resistance to "the more sincerely simpático Nazis." In such a soul-crushing environment, a simple murder comes as a relief. Or so thinks Dudley Smith, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, currently working for Army intelligence and devising all kinds of war-profiteering hustles on the side. Torrential rainstorms have unearthed a corpse, washed up in its very own pine box on a par-3 golf course - a "long-term decomp," in cop parlance, meaning the remains are sans flesh and all bones. By official guesstimate, man and box were burned in a fire, circa 1933. But the repercussions of the case will play out over the next several months. ("There was no better time to howl and throw parties.") For readers who keep track of these things, "This Storm" is the second volume, after "Perfidia," of Ellroy's Second L.A. Quartet. (For my money, the most notable novels in his great saga are "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential," the first and third books of The L.A. Quartet. But honestly, you can pick up the story anywhere.) Here the characters in those previous novels are younger and dangerously reckless. And this time we take a long look at Hideo Ashida, "crack forensic chemist and sly sleuth," who barely escapes internment by covering up a bookie racket: "Great shame undermines his great luck." Until it runs out, his luck is also ours: Of all the flawed characters caught up in the swirl of this epic novel, he's the guy with the most heart. if YOU'RE going to be bludgeoned to death with a bottle of wine, it might as well be a vintage with a certain cachet. In Anthony Horowitz's new mystery, the sentence IS DEATH (Harper, $27.99), a celebrity divorce lawyer named Richard Pryce is murdered with a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which is not too shabby. Classier still is the metafictional plot construction, which allows Horowitz-the-author to play Horowitz-the-character in his own novel. "I like to be in control of my books," he says, explaining why he has positioned himself as the lead detective's sidekick. The victim wasn't short of enemies. In one unseemly public display, a pretentious feminist author poured a glass of wine over his head and thus positioned herself as a suspect. But as the detective, Daniel Hawthorne, bluntly notes after the author has shared his own theories, "It was all too bloody obvious, mate." NOT HAVING aged in the past 20 years, Aimée Leduc, the heroine of MURDER IN BEL-AIR (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other Parisian mysteries by Cara Black, is quite capable of being the mother of a darling, almost-l-year-old child named Chloé. To be sure, time goes slowly in this captivating series and it's still only 1999. Aimée is still wearing high-fashion vintage clothing and scooting around on her pink Vespa while solving computer security breaches for Leduc Detective - and the odd murder case for her own satisfaction. Here Aimée's in Paris's 12th Arrondissement, not for the opera or for a stroll in the Bois de Vincennes, but to solve the murder of a homeless old woman. Aimée is also in search of her unpredictable American mother, Sydney, who has disappeared after failing to pick up Chloé from her playgroup in Bel-Air. Aimée doesn't need to pack heat on these adventures; the stiletto heels of her Louboutin ankle boots are weapon enough. But something more lethal is called for when Sydney's secretive work as a former C.I.A. operative comes to light, threatening not only Sydney and her professional contacts but also her family, including (gasp!) baby Chloé. DID martin walker really kill off that nice American art history student in the body in the castle WELL (Knopf, $25-95)? Yes, he did, which is very daring, considering that this is one of his charming mysteries set in the beautiful Périgord region of France and featuring his amiable sleuth, Bruno Courréges. Nice young women like Claudia Muller are rarely bumped off in nice country mysteries with nice local detectives, especially not detectives who take their horses and their truffle hounds into the woods for the sheer joy of it. But Walker knows exactly what he's doing in this series, which artfully seasons its plots with regional lore about the sport of falconry and with lessons in French history, particularly the World War II resistance - all while gently teasing the locals for indulging in "the French love of ceremony and dressing up." Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Lt. Bruno Courrges asks how a visiting American student could have ended up in a well in the peaceful, yet strangely homicidal, Prigord village of St. Denis.All too soon after she's reported missing, Bruno finds Claudia Muller, an art history Ph.D. student at Yale, in a disused well in the courtyard of the Limeuil castle along with a cat who's lucky enough to still be alive. Did cat-loving Claudia climb into the inadequately protected well to rescue the animal and end up tumbling in herself? Was she impaired by the drugs in her system? Or did someone deliberately toss her in? Suspicion quickly focuses on two men: Laurent Darrignac, the falconer who met and befriended her the very day he was released from a 10-year prison sentence for killing three Boy Scouts in a drunken driving accident, and Pierre de Bourdeille, the legendary art expert with whom Claudia had been working. On the face of it, both choices seem impossible: Laurent, who professed sincere repentance for the accident that jailed him, had clearly been attached to Claudia, and it's not obvious how de Bourdeille, a 90-something-year-old disabled by the bullet that made him a hero of the Resistance and confined for years to a wheelchair, would have had either the temperament or the physical ability to commit the crime. But the case is complicated by the news that Claudia had questioned some of her mentor's attributions, striking at his formidable reputation, and de Bourdeille's plan to leave his collection to the town of St. Denis, depriving his longtime housekeeper, Nathalie Bonnet, of the inheritance she'd grown to expect. Walker weaves the details of Bruno's unruffled investigation together with all the obligatory social rituals fans of the series (A Taste for Vengeance, 2018, etc.) have come to expect.A detective story whose dramatic trajectory is marked less by its rising suspense than by the increasingly elaborate meals consumed by the hero, who prepares one of its most endearing menus for the sometime lover who's just spent the night with him. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The disappearance of American Claudia Muller, an art history student, drives Walker's satisfying 14th outing for French chief of police Benoît "Bruno" Courrèges (after 2018's A Taste for Vengeance). When Claudia's body is found in a well in Bruno's small town of St. Denis, the preliminary autopsy leads the authorities to believe her death was an accident. Drugs may have been a contributing factor. Claudia was studying with a noted art scholar who was possibly engaged in shady dealings related to his valuable art collection. She was also seen in the presence of a man recently released from prison. Was her death a simple misfortune or something more sinister? The book's main strength is the intrepid Bruno, a horseback-riding and dog-loving master chef whose calm professional practicality pulls the reader into the well-developed, if familiar, crime story. Whether he's preparing a gourmet dinner, enjoying a glass of wine, or solving a murder, it's a pleasure to be in Bruno's company. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Bruno Courrèges, municipal policeman for the village of St. Denis and chief of police for the Vézère Valley in France's Dordogne, has an enviable life, one that often starts with a morning horseback ride, continues with croissants at his favorite café, lunch with friends at a picturesque bistro, dinner consisting of locally sourced food from his own farm, and visits from women who are former lovers and still occasional bed partners. The mysteries that come his way don't upset his routine; in fact, Bruno's cozy web of friends and wide interests help solve them, often from something said at the weekly dinners he and his friends take turns hosting. In this, the twelfth entry in the Bruno, Chief of Police, series, Bruno learns from a friend that a young American woman, an art-history student visiting from Yale, has been discovered dead at the bottom of a well, just outside a castle where she'd attended a lecture. The girl's heavy use of opioids complicates the investigation: Was this murder or an accidental fall caused by an overdose? Adding to the interest is the fact that Bruno had known this woman for months (a flashback provides details about their friendly acquaintance). Martin always delivers a live-wire plot, well-realized characters (he's especially adept at character-revealing scenes), and an incredibly varied setting this time, he throws in some expertise in medieval falconry. Another winner in an always-strong series.--Connie Fletcher Copyright 2019 Booklist