Murder and misdeeds keep French policeman Bruno Courreges on his toes in this third installment in Walker's consistently charming series. This time around, Officer Courreges, the only law-enforcement presence in the idyllic French village of St. Denis, investigates suspicious transactions at the truffle market in nearby Perigord, a series of violent attacks on local Vietnamese vendors, and the brutal murder of a longtime friend. With all this chaos, there's little room for Bruno to relish life's extracurriculars: cooking, hunting, and spending time with his quirky English girlfriend. The investigation of his comrade's untimely demise brings Bruno face-to-face with unsavory facts from France's colonial history, namely the country's involvement in Vietnam. (It also finds him dangerously close to a comely old flame.) Poor Bruno can't seem to catch a break: even the truffle case mushrooms into something much larger than anticipated. Bruno Courreges may be a small-town cop, but he's anything but small-minded. Walker, editor-in-chief emeritus and international-affairs columnist at United Press International, has created a character who's endearingly human and worldly wise.--Block, Allison Copyright 2010 Booklist

A paean to the truffle.When Hercule Vendrot is murdered while hunting truffles in the Dordogne, his death comes under the purview of his friend and fellow enthusiast of the melanosporum (black diamond truffle) Bruno Courreges. Vendrot had warned Bruno, Chief of Police of the village of St. Denis, that there were shenanigans going on in the Ste. Alvere truffle market. The troubles had escalated from price-fixing to the ransacking of a Vietnamese stall, the firebombing of a Chinese restaurant and full-scale Asian warfare, with Chinese and Vietnamese gangs battling each other for control of the valuable truffle market. Furthermore, both Guillaume Pons and his father, truffle dealers, are vying to become mayor, and the Communists, the Socialists and the Greens are taking sides to determine the outcome. More complications arise when it appears that Vendrot's past includes a stint supervising governmental torture, assassinations and upheaval during the Vietnam era. His will lists his Vietnamese daughter as one of his heirs, if only she can be found. Bruno's love life takes a turn for the worse when an English ex-pat becomes enamored of Guillaume, but he finds solace in preparing a venison casserole and creme brulee with truffles for Vendrot's wake, providing a soothing respite before he's tossed back into a mess that includes more arson, a double murder, illegals scurrying hither and yon and Vendrot's memoirs revealing Algerian treachery.The meat-and-potatoes political thriller is supplemented and upstaged by a glorious foodie's delight, from an author who knows his way around the French passions (The Dark Vineyard,2010, etc.).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Gallic charm suffuses Walker's third mystery of the French countryside (after 2010's The Dark Vineyard). Bruno Courreges, the engaging do-gooder police chief of St. Denis in the Perigord region, likes to hunt for truffles with his basset hound, Gigi, and his mentor, Hercule, a retired intelligence agent with ties to Southeast Asia. Hercule's savage murder thrusts Bruno into a boiling conflict between France's Vietnamese refugees and the Chinese mob now rapidly surpassing them in France's underworld. Walker deftly seasons this complicated criminal melange with the multimillion-dollar truffle trade and the rowdy Green threat to St. Denis's traditional way of life, adding savory soupcons of Bruno's romances past (Isabelle of the Police Nationale), present (exotically English Pamela), and possibly future (needy single mother and research chemist Florence). Like the aroma of amateur chef Bruno's venison stew, which virtually leaps off the pages, Walker's unmistakable affection for the "enchanting Perigord" makes every morsel of this cozy-cum-crime novel a savory delight. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The big question left hanging at the end of THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), George Pelecanos's latest Washington, D.C., crime novel, is whether he can keep his cocky new hero from flaming out. At 29, Spero Lucas, an unlicensed investigator for a criminal defense attorney (and anyone else who'll give him a cut of the action), is considerably younger and friskier than the heavy-lidded private eyes who have imprinted their world-weary stamp on this genre. His values are also different, shaped by the street culture of his tough neighborhood and by his experiences as a Marine in Iraq. Even his musical tastes are more contemporary. (No moody blues for this guy, who prefers reggae, ska and dub.) "There are certain bars I don't hang in," Lucas explains. "I'm not gonna sit around and have drinks with people who are, you know, ironic." He's also man enough to put flowers on his father's grave and pay regular visits to his mother. Lucas is a terrific character, uncorrupted by cynicism and boyishly eager to catch up on the recreational adventures he sacrificed for military service. But, as a young man with appetites, he's also hotheaded and dangerously reckless. Moonlighting for an imprisoned mobster who agrees to his hefty cut for retrieving some stolen shipments of marijuana, Lucas becomes trapped in a gang war that quickly turns brutal and bloody. Before he knows it, he's aiming to kill. The novel's story is O.K., but nowhere near as heart-racing as the storytelling. Although Pelecanos writes in the third person, he seems to be inside Lucas's head, looking out at the world with the omnivorous vision of someone savoring and recording every precious detail. Street scenes are studied as if they were treasures, with individual shops and buildings identified by name and history. Favorite bars are defined by their posters and jukeboxes, diners by their menus and the conversations of their clientele, guns by their make and caliber. People are examined in the same meticulous detail, from their choice of footwear to the murderous thoughts in their heads. What emerges is a magnificent collage of a city loved with a passion by someone ravenous for life. Childhood is a terrifying place in Laura Lippman's psychological thrillers, but that never stops her characters from revisiting this dark country once they've grown up. By mutual consent, the five young friends in THE MOST DANGEROUS THING (Morrow/Harper-Collins, $25.99) went their separate ways in the fall of 1979 after "something bad" happened in the woods. ("They couldn't talk about it, and they couldn't not talk about it, so they stayed away from each other.") Thirty-two years later, the violent death of one of their number - a manic, reckless boy they called "Go-Go" - brings the rest of the clique back home to the neighborhood that once gave them unsupervised access to the wild forest where they lost their innocence. A mysterious childhood secret is standard fare in suspense novels, but Lippman keeps this device fresh with a complex narrative structure of shifting timelines and multiple points of view. These changes in perspective allow her to circle the secret in a way that broadens the mystery and deepens the characters, without ever distracting us from the nagging question of where their parents were when these kids were romping in the woods. The residents of the quiet town where Martin Walker sets his enchanting village mysteries relish all the good things about life in the Périgord region of France: the food, the wine, the friendships and the black truffles that grow among the white oaks in its dense forests. But all it takes is a murder to stir up the animosities of people who, while still fighting old wars, are quick to take up new ones. There's actually too much intrigue in BLACK DIAMOND (Knopf, $24.95), much of it (like the Asian gang wars and human smuggling ring) tangential to more interesting local matters, like the criminal hanky-panky at the great truffle market of Ste. Alvère and the impact of ecological activism on homegrown industries. Happily, Bruno Courrèges, the charming chief of police of St. Denis, doesn't completely lose his head. There are truffles to gather and market days to attend, as well as a sumptuous funeral banquet for a murdered truffle master that surpasses any meal cooked up thus far in a series that always makes your mouth water. Reading Sebastian Rotella's remarkable first novel, TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99) is like putting on night goggles: you see things you never knew were there. Rotella, who has covered crime in Latin America as a journalist, sets this thriller in the borderlands of San Diego and Tijuana, but takes the plot beyond the well-traveled fictional territory of Mexican drug cartels and beleaguered customs agents - all the way to the lawless "triple border" of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay where international smugglers and terrorists meet to do business. Valentine Pescatore, an extremely likable young agent with the Border Patrol, represents the good guys for the United States. Leobardo Méndez, commander of an elite law-enforcement unit known as the Diogenes Group, carries the colors for the Mexicans. The pounding action scenes are driven by Rotella's ferocious prose style, but it takes the night vision of a couple of decent cops to expose the scale of the violence, the level of the corruption, the sheer audacity of the criminals. Can George Pelecanos keep the hero of his latest Washington, D.C., crime series from flaming out?