Death on the Pont Noir

By Adrian Magson

Nothing else mattered. He’d been cut loose by his bosses and his twisted vision of what had happened saw only one ending: revenge. And that revenge was centred solely on Rocco.

1963, France. A farmer reports a truck ramming into a car near Picardie, followed by gunfire. A group of Englishmen are brought in after a bar fight. A tramp’s body is discovered in a burnt out truck. All this occurring after multiple attempts on the President’s life.

Inspector Lucas Rocco knows there’s a connection somewhere, and is recruited by Colonel Saint-Cloud to assist with the President’s Security. Yet despite all clues pointing to the Pont Noir for the next attempt, both Massin and Saint-Cloud reject his suspicions. Left with no other option, Rocco decides to investigate the situation alone, risking censure by his superiors.

And he must also contend with the lethal response of English gangsters if he should go too far. When the group of Englishmen return to France Rocco finds himself the victim of a set-up, leading to his suspension and investigation for bribery. With no badge, no authority and unsupported, Rocco is still determined to continue his investigation...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allison & Busby
• Release date: Jun 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780749012656

Adrian Magson

Adrian Magson is the author of 20 crime and spy thrillers. His series protagonists include Gavin & Palmer, Harry Tate, Marc Portman, Insp Lucas Rocco and Gonzales & Vaslik. He is also the author of ‘Write On!’ a writer’s help book.

Reviews for Death on the Pont Noir

[edwardsgt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Inspector Rocco is sent to a backwater in Picardy from Paris as part of a reorganisation and is immediately thrown into a mysterious death enquiry with links back into murky WW2 resistance activity. Set in 1963 during the Presidency of de Gaulle it really evokes a country and period still coming to terms with WW2 and people's roles in the resistance. An enjoyable read which left me keen to sample more.

[condorena · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Marais is the French word for marsh and that is what Inspector Lucas Rocco found when he was transferred. He had been a Paris policeman when the Interior Ministry felt that rural provinces needed some Parisian expertise in law enforcement and Rocco was sent to a town in a northwest province of France. His superiors had a few interesting things to say of him “That he was an insubordinate bastard, insolent as well as pushy, dogmatic and a nobody, reckless…a rebel. A good cop though.
Rocco expects the new assignment to be quiet, uneventful and maybe boring but he doesn’t expect that the first thing he runs into in the village to be a crowd pulling a dead woman from the marsh at the edge of a war cemetery wearing a Gestapo uniform twenty years after the war was over.
Rocco’s war experiences were of a later era. He spent his army days in the jungles of Indochina during the conflict between the French and the Vietnamese after France reoccupied the area after WWII.
Once the woman is identified as the daughter of a well-connected wealthy man named Phillippe Bayer-Barbier the detective heads back to Paris following the trail of very dirty secrets.
There is an interesting cast of ancillary characters in this village, the local policeman, a tramp whose expertise is defusing bombs left over from the war as well as several people who service a small mansion where Parisian men come for nefarious mostly sexual purposes and perversions.