Whatever his other flaws, the laconic, Armagnac-loving Bordelaise detective Superintendent Lannes is not lacking in self-knowledge: "I'm a beat-up policeman with a lousy job, in hock to the Nazis in our beautiful occupied city in our lovely humiliated France." He also has unfinished business from the first part of Allan Massie's projected trilogy of Vichy-era thrillers, Death in Bordeaux. An elderly professor with communist leanings is found bludgeoned to death in a park. Lannes hopes it will be a "an old-fashioned, pre-War murder", but it proves to be nothing of the sort as Lannes is sucked into shady areas of collaboration and compromise. The crime-solving is the least engaging aspect, as there's never a chance of the perpetrators being brought to trial. But Massie expertly captures the privations of surrender: cheap cigars, undrinkable coffee and the enervating sense of being suspended in limbo. As Lannes's wife Marguerite puts it: "We're all tired. Tired of this war which isn't being fought and tired of the conditions of this peace which isn't peace."