Massie, Allan. Dark Summer in Bordeaux. London: Quartet, 2012.

Something comforting about sequels or book series: the same characters, some nice, some not. Rather like a family with whom you become reacquainted, and, good or bad, you can’t wait to see them again. So true with Massie’s four-book offering set during World War II.
 
Near the end of Death in Bordeaux, Lannes, la police judiciaire detective, manages to see that his son Dominique is released from his military POW camp in Germany. It is through a Faustian deal that he accomplishes this feat, but the act pleases Lannes’s wife no end, not to mention Lannes himself and his other two children. The family is once again intact. The murder from the first book, Death in Bordeaux,  remains a secret, but now Lannes is faced with a new situation just as diabolical as in his first novel.
 
I thought the gay character (corpse with his penis in his mouth) was a one-off, but not so. In this sequel, Léon, a young chap who works in a bookshop (for the man whose brother was murdered) is quietly gay himself, not to mention being good friends with Lannes’s son, Alain, who is straight. Well. A young German soldier begins to flirt with Léon when he comes into the bookshop. Turns out they are being observed by an enemy operative who wishes to entrap the soldier. He enlists young Léon by raping him and saying that worse will happen if he does not help him to snare his German quarry. Reluctantly, but realizing he has no choice, Léon does the operative’s bidding. Later, the soldier will kill himself.
 
There is much more to this sequel which kept me turning the pages faster than the first one, and if you’re into sort-of murder mysteries, more thrillers, actually, then you may like this series. Oh, and this book might be renamed The Unsaid. Throughout there exist any number of inner monologues in which Lannes and others voice only through their thoughts what they would like to say aloud. Perhaps Massie is suggesting what it is like to live in German-occupied France during World War II. Effective in any case. Mum’s the word!
 
One caveat: the publisher does not seem to employ a very competent copy editor. Each book has close to a half-dozen errors in each (in Dark Summer, page 89, one main character’s name, Miriam, is misspelled, M-i-r-i-a-n). This kind of sloppiness spoils an otherwise pleasant reading experience.

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