The Past is Never Really Past

DEADLY TASTING (Winemaker Detective #4)
Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen
Le French Book
June 2014

In the beginning of Deadly Tasting I was extremely amused by gourmand and winemaker Benjamin Cooker being put on a diet by his loving wife, Elisabeth. It had always seemed to me that Benjamin ate and drank wine to excess with no visible ill-effects. It did not make me like him or his fussy quirks any better in the previous books of the series. On day one of the cabbage diet he receives a call from Inspector Barbaroux summoning him to a crime scene. A very elderly man has been slaughtered in his apartment and the scene is odd indeed. Twelve wine glasses are circled on a table, one full and eleven empty. The Inspector wants Cooker to taste the wine in the hope that it will give him some clue to work with. Benjamin narrows down the wine to it's region and with the help of a friend determines that it is a vintage from the 1940 s during the Nazi Occupation of  France. Meanwhile the bodies of old men are piling up along with the desecration of the graves of other elderly men. Someone is settling a grievance that goes back to the dark days of WWII and leaving a message with twelve wine glasses at each scene, a new glass filled for each victim.

I was very interested in the historical detail included in Deadly Tasting  as I know little about events in occupied France. It should come as no surprise that the Nazis looted the wines as they did everything else but I was surprised that they installed their own functionaries to oversee production. There are tales here of both heroism and complete venality and as always, some were neither rewarded nor punished. The authors have taken these details and constructed a very tidy mystery. Deadly Tasting is less about wine and more about the lingering effects of some of the darkest days in France's history. I liked this new direction in the series and found Benjamin's struggle with his diet a welcome and humorous diversion. 

Thanks to netgalley.com and Le French Book for an advance digital copy.

RATING- 3 stars