An Anne Marie Laveaud Novel Series

April 1990: French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud has been living and working in the French Caribbean département of Guadeloupe for more than a decade, but her days are still full of surprises. She is only just starting to investigate the suspicious suicide of a high-profile environmental activist and media personality when she is pulled off the case. Is it because she was getting too close to the truth?

But the new case she’s been assigned takes precedence. The naked body of a white woman has been discovered on a beach. The victim’s remains offer no clues about her final hours—she was found without any of her belongings, and it seems she had been dead at least three days before anyone spotted her corpse. What turned this woman’s vacation in paradise into a final nightmare?

As always, the story of a murdered white woman attracts international media attention. The pressure is on Anne Marie to solve the murder quickly, before bad publicity destroys the island’s all-important tourist industry.

The long-awaited return of Timothy Williams, CWA award-winning grand master of crime fiction, whom The Observer named one of the “10 Best Modern European Crime Writers” 
 
The sun-drenched Caribbean island of Guadeloupe is technically part of France, subject to French law and loyal to the French Republic. But in 1980, the scars of colonialism are still fresh, and ethnic tensions and political unrest seethe just below the surface of everyday life.
 
French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud relocated to this beautiful Caribbean island confident that she could make it her new home. But her day-to-day life is rife with frustration. Now she is assigned a murder case in which she is sure the chief suspect, an elderly ex-con named Hégésippe Bray, is a political scapegoat. Her superiors are dismissive of her efforts to prove Bray innocent, and to add insult to injury, Bray himself won’t even speak to her because she’s a woman. But she won’t give up, and Anne Marie’s investigations lead her into a complex tangle of injustice, domestic terrorists, broken hearts, and maybe even voodoo.