Do you dream of the South? The sea, its colors, its scents haunt you? Here is what to compensate for this lack. Xavier-Marie Bonnot gives the Mediterranean the leading role in his new thriller, “The waves still come back to the shore”. The waves serve as a common thread as well as decor and even habitat. Now retired from the police, the hero of the story, Michel De Palma aka Le Baron, has in fact chosen to live on a boat moored in the port of L’Estaque. He now intends to devote himself to sailing … and to studying the violin. Note also that, like other famous investigators of detective novels including Wallander, De Palma is a great lover of opera.
The dead woman helped the migrants
As you may have guessed, De Palma will soon be back in service. Xavier-Marie Bonnot’s Mediterranean is indeed not just idyllic. It is also that of migrants in peril and their makeshift boats threatened by murderous shipwrecks. A tragedy that immediately appears in the novel with the death by poisoning, in her Marseille apartment, of the Greek Thalia Georguis, 41, a psychiatric doctor specializing in the reception of migrants and refugees. This work led her in particular to collaborate with SOS Mare Nostrum in the Moria camp, on the island of Lesbos. An engagement that could well be linked to his assassination.
In memory of a love
Fifteen years earlier, Thalia had briefly passed through the life of Michel De Palma. To pay a last tribute to this brief but intense love, the former police officer will discreetly conduct the investigation, relying in particular on photos and a manuscript found in the apartment. His research, and a second victim, will lead him to take an interest in the nauseating ideology of far-right groups hostile to migrants. Suspicion, but no proof. Going back to exile in reverse, Le Baron then went to Palermo, then to Lesbos. Where, between vines, olive groves and cork oak plantations, the truth suddenly jumps in his face!
“The waves always come back to the shore”. By Xavier-Marie Bonnot. Belfond, 300 p.
–
