Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle (USA 2024)

From the Publisher:
In France, a police detective hunts for an elusive killer in this novel by an award-winning author who "writes like no one else" (Los Angeles Times).

In the tiny French town of Soulay, Inspector Henri Castang is dealing with a brutal robbery, a drugged teenager, and the sad delusions of a nervous old lady. But when a violent death suggests a mysterious connection to recent events in Paris Castang must untangle a mix of spiteful small-town gossip and big-city crime.

This lively mystery comes from a winner of the Edgar and Gold Dagger Awards -- "the most eccentric, the most idiosyncratic and the most European of crime writers" (Anita Brookner).

Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle. A Henri Castang Mystery. Early Bird Books / Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504092241 (August, 2024), 264 p., $21.99.

Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle (USA 2023)

From the Publisher:
In France, a police detective hunts for an elusive killer in this novel by an award-winning author who "writes like no one else" (Los Angeles Times).

In the tiny French town of Soulay, Inspector Henri Castang is dealing with a brutal robbery, a drugged teenager, and the sad delusions of a nervous old lady. But when a violent death suggests a mysterious connection to recent events in Paris Castang must untangle a mix of spiteful small-town gossip and big-city crime.

This lively mystery comes from a winner of the Edgar and Gold Dagger Awards -- "the most eccentric, the most idiosyncratic and the most European of crime writers" (Anita Brookner).

Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle. A Henri Castang Mystery. Early Bird Books / Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504088190 (May, 2023), eBook, 2088 KB (ca. 264 p.), $14.99.

Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle (2001)

From the Publisher:
A brutal robbery, a drugged teenager and the sad delusions of a nervous old lady mean nothing to Henri Castang who finds a parallel between the small town world of gossip and spite, and a fetid corner of a Paris room where a man shot at him. What's another piece of wanton violence got to do with anything? That's the question Castang finds himself asking as Nicolas Freeling uncovers the Lake Isle of everyone's dreams in this enchanting, mysterious fiction.

Nicolas Freeling: Lake Isle. A Henri Castang Mystery. House of Stratus, ISBN: 1842328530 (June, 2001), 244 p., £6.99, $11.50.

Nicolas Freeling: Sabine (USA 1978)

From the Publisher:
The latest case Henri Castang of the Police Judiciaire investigated was in The Bugles Blowing. And the Houston Post said: "This is not a mystery. It is a novel of suspense and a fine one, full of wisdom, an interesting and informative exposition of French criminal law, and food for thought well above and beyond the usual expectations of the detective story."

Castang, at the moment we meet him again, was in Paris -- his mission, to arrest a dangerous man who carried a gun.
But shortly thereafter his main concern became an old woman, a poet, named Sabine Arthur. She had been a good poet, but she hadn't published anything recently. She was seventy-three. She lived in the historic walled town of Soulay. She was a rich widow.

She and her late husband had been childless, and finally they'd adopted a boy of ten, who was now a married man with two children of his own.

And Sabine had come to the police to say she was being persecuted and felt her life was threatened -- perhaps by her son, perhaps by his wife.

Castang had been sent to find out what was really going on.

"You think I'm a crazy old woman," Sabine said to him.
"It isn't easy to evaluate," Castang replied.
And began discreetly to evaluate, to investigate.
Until the murder.

A small town is a difficult place in which to hunt a killer. And Soulay was no ordinary small town. But Castang is no ordinary policeman!

Jacket design by Tony Yee

Nicolas Freeling: Sabine. A Harper Novel of Suspense. Harper & Row, ISBN: 0060113561 (February, 1978), 217 p., $7.95.