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Gillian Bickley

Deadly Slipper: A Novel of Death in the Dordogne

by Michelle Wan

Doubleday, $187

This murder mystery-cum-thriller certainly keeps you reading. Has the heroine's long-missing twin, Bedie, really been murdered? Will Mara herself become a victim of a previously unsuspected serial killer?

It's 19 years since French-Canadian orchid-enthusiast Bedie disappeared in rural France, and many years since the French police let the case  lie dormant.  Mara, desperate for closure, has  returned to the Dordogne, to find out the truth and, after that, to get on with her life.

Aided by local wild orchid expert and woman-shy expatriate Englishman Julian  Wood, Mara uses a sequence of orchid images to identify the route  Bedie took on her own last orchid-seeking expedition. Printed from old  film found in  Bedie's camera that Mara chanced on in a junk shop, the photographs also show a castle and a pigeonnier.

But which castle and which dovecote?

In the search for answers, Mara makes  new acquaintances and friends: a retired policeman, the local postman, the manager  of a local restaurant and his wife, the elderly  lord of the manor  and his mentally fragile wife.  She comes to fear Vrac, the hulking simple bastard son of the seigneur, and his mother,  the ill-favoured hugely strong woman known  as la Binette (or hoe).

Not unwilling to 'get a life', Mara falls in  turn for Julian and then for the charming son of the seigneur, Alain de Sauvignac, whose periodic returns from life spent as a civil engineer in former French Africa coincide with the disappearances of several vulnerable women.

The steady accumulation of suspects is fairly transparent, and the story is kept going by Mara's blindness to her danger, as well as to the clues the reader notices with ease. Paradoxically, these features may add to the reading pleasure, allowing us to pat ourselves on the back.

The setting of this gripping story is particularly interesting. The fresh Dordogne landscape is clearly and persuasively drawn.  The locals, with their goat's cheese-making, free-range eggs, gastronomic elan, village sporting loyalties and fierce local pride are almost as clearly indicated as the Cotswold characters  of the late Laurie Lee's classic autobiography, Cider with Rosie.

We learn a lot about orchids. For example, some mimic insects in shape and colour, seducing bees into pseudocopulation, so winning pollination.  There's fascinating specialist information, also, about the past economic value of pigeons. 'For centuries  they were valued for meat, eggs, and fertiliser, especially ... where we have little livestock ... Pigeon dung was so precious that it was given

as dowries and passed down from generation to generation.'

If the success of Peter Mayle's memoir, A Year in Provence, published about 15 years ago, is anything to go by, Deadly Slipper, with its  portrait of another French rural region, may well win  readers, too.



Deadly Slipper: A Novel of Death in the Dordogne