The Gift

Commandant Frédéric de Massol unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk and extracts the paper file he keeps as a reminder he had once aspired to be remembered as a great detective. He wonders if he has enough lingering professional pride to crack the case that was meant to define his career.The sequel to Barbara Lewis’ nuanced and atmospheric first novel A Year in Paradise, The Gift returns to la France profonde to take up lives still in turmoil years after the murder of the world’s most powerful oil minister in a Cognac vineyard.While de Massol painstakingly pieces together fragments of the truth, the swaggering television journalist David Alvarez bellows across the “Where’s the news? And where’s the why? That really bugs me. And why the hell was he killed in a vineyard of all places?”