Death in the Dordogne, by Louis Sanders

Well, any book on France catches my eye, whether fiction or non-fiction, I grab them all with greedy passion. However, maybe I'll be sorry I found this one at my local library.

I'm preparing for a trip in a month where I am going to drive around the Dordogne region of France, probably the last region I haven't explored. Well, not just the Dordogne - I will then head to the South of France via Toulouse and Carcassone, before swinging up to Andorra and Northern Spain.

Anyhow...my point...I've just finished reading Death in the Dordogne. How did Sanders get the French Ministry of Culture (Centre National du Livre) to assist in its publication. It paints a pretty bleak picture of the Dordogne - the cold, the rain, the bleakness, the War, the Resistance (the French don't call it the Resistance), the murders, the odd people - locals and expats. Well, it wouldn't make me want to go there if I hadn't read all the other glowing tomes. As the blurb says, it's not "A Year in Provence.'

This is the Dordogne I hope to discover.

Here's a couple of short reviews:

The February weather may be dark and dismal, but the locals provide plenty of colour as "a newly installed Englishman" in rural southern France copes with odd neighbors (a secretive doctor, a reclusive Dutch woman, a goat-breeding English alcoholic) and odder fatal accidents in Louis Sanders's engaging debut, Death in the Dordogne, translated by Adriana Hunter. The genial narrator, lacking anything better to do, busies himself with investigating, and he turns up old grudges that lead to new crimes in the first of a series.


When you moved to France to a picturesque hamlet in the Dordogne no one said it would be like this in February: freezing cold, dark by mid-afternoon and so quiet. Members of the Caminade family keep dying in suspicious circumstances, and the doctor knows more about it than he's prepared to reveal…. Slyly funny and delightfully laconic, Death in the Dordogne is the perfect accompaniment for anyone thinking about a holiday in France! (Ya think?)

I've since discovered Louis Sanders is an editor at a publishing house and he now lives in rural France in the Dordogne with his English wife. I figure the reason he wrote such a bleak tale of the Dordogne is that it is already full of the English and he wants to stop the influx! Maybe I can track him down and ask him. He's supposed to be writing a series, the lucky dog!

Go to this link for more info...