An intriguing set up for our very weary duo.
Before the war, the luxury spa hotels of Vittel hosted the wealthiest members of French and international society. Now, in the winter of 1943, two of these hotels hold British and American women, the former since 1939 and the later since December 1941. The prisoners had lived quietly, surviving on Red Cross aid packages, but now they are beginning to die.
One American woman died in a fall down an elevator shaft, and it was assumed to be an accident, then an unknown assailant stabbed another to death with a pitchfork in the stables. With the second death the commandant calls for help, and inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo arrive. In the pockets of the second victim they find Cracker Jacks and Hershey bars — presumed to be bribes for the guards. St-Cyr and Kohler have to unravel a conspiracy that is at the heart of this odd arrangement.
Above is an edited version of the blurb on the Amazon web site which seemed to me to be both inaccurate and overblown. No Germans stormed into Vichy. The two groups of women are in separate hotels and that is part of the plot, and they have been incarcerated for different periods of time. Whatever the past of the hotels, there is no luxury to be found there. Nor does it make sense to call a hotel a camp. The garbled blurb is very like Janes’s prose. I have read many of the titles in this series but the prose is leaden.
Janes does a good job of distinguishing among the women. There are many different stories among them, and in fact, some of the inmates are French married to Brits or Yanks but with the wrong passports when their papers were inspected. Their individual hopes, aspirations, methods of dealing with the privations and boredom are well brought out, like clutching at occult straws. Confined and controlled for years, there are endless frictions, grievances, and complaints which, powerless to affect the casual agents, the Germans, they take out on each other. There are tensions between the two nationalities, and even more within each.
‘These papers are not in order!’
By the same token there are tensions among the German guards, who would rather be there than in Russia. The commandant who called in the investigators has been undermined and replaced by a subordinate who wants no investigation.
Most of the investigation falls on the American hotel, many of the occupants of which are students who were doing courses in France when the curtain fell.
The grey prose, the cryptic descriptions, the gnomic interpretations, the ambiguity of voices, they all combine to obscure the denouement. But then I read these for the atmosphere, not the arrival. Once again the pair prevail despite all the impediments.
‘Atmosphere’ I said. For example, the privations of the Occupation. Everyone is hungry, and have lived for so long on a poor diet that their senses are diminished, they have no stamina, and cannot concentrate. Nor are the German jailers much better off.
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