BLACK WATER LILIES

 Authour : Michel Bussi, Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside

Publisher : In France by Presses de la Cite 2011, In Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2016. Pages 350

 

Excerpts :

( ) Inspector Serenac says ironically, ‘No guys, I’m prepared to take a bet on this. Imagine picking up that rock and smashing Morval’s brain in, there, on the bank. And the corpse’s head would be found, submerged in the water at a depth of ten centimeters? The chances are less than one in a thousand. Gentlemen, I think the situation is much simpler. We’re dealing with the triple murder of a single individual. One, I stab you. Two, I smash your head in. Three, I drown you in the stream …We’re dealing with someone highly motivated. Someone stubborn. And someone very very angry with Jerome Morval.’

( ) Serenac’s fingers extract a piece of crumpled card from the outside pocket of the corpse’s jacket. The inspector lowers his eyes. It is a simple postcard. The illustration depicts Monet’s Water Lilies, a study in blue: a reproduction of the kind sold by the million throughout the world. Serenac turns the card over. The text is short, the letters typed: ELEVEN YEARS OLD. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Just below those five words is a thin strip of paper that has been cut out and glued to the card. Nine words, this time. The crime of dreaming. I agree to its creation.

( ) The five photographs are spread out on the station desk. Laurenc Serenac is holding a brown envelope.

‘Good God,’ says Sylvio Benavides, ‘who could have sent that?’

‘We don’t know. We found the envelope in this morning’s post. It was sent from a post box in Vernon, yesterday evening.’

Jerome Morval is present in each one, but each time he is accompanied by a different woman, none of them his wife.

( ) I hesitate. After all, even if I have nothing left to lose, it isn’t easy to throw such confession in her face. I wait until she’s sitting down on a leather armchair in the drawing room.

‘Yes, Patricia, it is about Jerome’s murder. I know the name of his killer.’

( ) Kate Murer’s home is filled with worthless old objects – knick-knacks, baubles, that no one wanted, cracked crockery. What the devil was Jerome Morval doing visiting an old Englishwoman on that godforsaken island ?

My take : The book has lengthy spiels on paintings by Monet, artists doing paintings, discussions with museum curators, lost paintings, etc. But none of this effort by the author, which consumes a couple of hundred pages, has any relevance to the murder mystery or its motive. The ending is also very tame and unconvincing. A waste.

=======

Subject type : Murder mystery

Narrative Style : meandering

Readability : Poor

Reader’s Interest : lacking

======

 Available at

Available on Amazon  at the time of posting the blog

Available on Flipkart at the time of posting the blog

Would change depending on sale & stock. Check current availability and  price