Author Dana Stabenow recently reviewed A Grave in the Woods by Martin Walker. There are signed copies of this Bruno, Chief of Police novel available in the Webstore, along with Walker’s other books. But, don’t expect them by December 25. Shipping deadlines mean it’s too late. But, give it to yourself or someone else as a gift after the holidays! https://bit.ly/47rtL3v.
Here’s Stabenow’s review of A Grave in the Woods.
Of Martin Walker’s 17 Bruno novels, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed (especially the food) this feels like the one that was written straight from the heart. The past is always very much present in these books, but here a secret grave revealing the raped and murdered corpses of two young German women and a murdered Italian officer from the last year of World War II feels somehow more real and more immediate than anything he has written before. Fabiola, the local doctor, in her words.
“My tentative initial conclusion is that each of these women died as a result of a broken neck, cause unknown.” She turned off the microphone and placed a hand on the skull that lolled to one side. Then she stood silently for a long moment before turning to face Bruno and the other men with cold fury in her eyes. “…the fact that they were naked and their necks deliberately broken provokes the inevitable assumption that they were raped and murdered, like so many women in so many wars in so much of our human history…” The four men stood silently as she left, their eyes downcast, not glancing at one another and not following Fabiola as she walked toward the bridge…
The discovery provokes a response from the citizens of St. Denis, its department, France, Italy, and Germany that surprises everyone, but which the mayor as is his wont turns to St. Denis’ advantage by creating a memorial to all the dead of that war. Which action also greatly interferes with Bruno, still in recovery from his wounds from the previous book, investigating a cryptocurrency crime (is there anything other than crime in stories, fact or fiction, about cryptocurrency?) involving a young American divorcée newly moved to France. Which crime of course has international implications and makes J.J. and the general especially cranky.
Later, at dinner at the baron’s, when singers Rod and Amélie debut a song about the newly discovered dead in the hearing of the children and grandchildren of the people who fought the war to end all wars, Bruno himself is provoked to long and deep thought.
Mon Dieu, how that war lives in us, its heirs, Bruno thought. How much it gave the Americans the conviction that they had a duty to save the world. And how it gave the Russians a mission to save, not socialism, but the historic sense of Russia as the land that had saved Europe from the Mongol hordes in medieval times and saved them again from the Nazis in the twentieth century. We live still in the shadow of that war, seek to learn its lessons, talk of a better world in which such grief and loss and torment can never return.
Cue any headline of news of Europe today. As always, an enjoyable read (with whackamole love interest Isabella mercifully restricted to a single phone call) and a breakneck denouement in the middle of an epic flood, but also a thoughtful look at the history of present day realities in Europe, the place that has given and taken so much from the rest of us over the last two millennia. Recommended.