Tuesday, September 08, 2009

JAQUOT & THE MASTER by Martin O'Brien (2007)


Having just been through Provence on some of the hottest days of the year this past June, the setting with Cavaillon yawning in the distance was especially appealing to me.

Dreamy Chief Inspector Daniel Jaquot is called to an artist's retreat in a luxury hill-top hotel near Luissac, an old Monastere, when one of the guests, a beautiful young woman, disappears, her bedclothes blood-damp. There are several guests easily suspect due to means and motive as well as having their own lecherous secrets to conceal.

In the Ivory Tower itself is a celebrated and reclusive painter who had been friends with Picasso and Matisse and whose current favour many of the guests are attempting to curry, among them an award-winning documentary filmmaker from Cannes, aspiring landscape painters, a rich patron of the arts and the artist's agent.

When two corpses are discovered, everyone's passion erupts.