The Game of Illusions: A French Crime Thriller

Some men disappear. Some are made to vanish. In a village this beautiful, it's hard to tell the difference.High in the Alpilles, in one of those honey-stone hilltop villages that tourists photograph and never really see, a man walks out one evening and doesn't come back. At first it looks like a sad, simple story - a troubled soul, a drinking problem, a life quietly coming apart. Lieutenant Roxane Baxter, of Marseille's Major Crimes unit, isn't so sure.The deeper she digs, the more the village's contented surface cracks: old families and new money, buried grievances, and a great many people with reasons to keep the past exactly where it lies.Morgan Baxter reads the place the way he reads a stalled movement - searching for the single piece that sits out of true. His methods haven't changed. Neither have the law's blind spots.But Roxane has changed. She knows now what her father is - and the thought that frightens her most is how easily she has begun to think like him. As one illusion after another falls away, the hardest truth to face isn't the village's. It's her own.Luminous on the surface, dark beneath, The Game of Illusions is the third Watchmaker mystery - a Provence mystery for readers of Martin Walker's Bruno and Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano.