EARLY PRAISE for THE PARIS DIRECTIVE

BOOKLIST -- Starred Review-- May 1, 2012

The Paris Directive   Jay, Gerald (author). June 2012. 336p. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, hardcover, $25.   First published May 1, 2012 (Booklist). Paris police Inspecteur Paul Mazarelle transferred to the sleepy Dordogne when his wife decided to return to the village of her birth to spend her final days. A year after her death, he’s lonely and unfulfilled by rural life and policing. But the brutal murders of two American couples put a spring in his step. What he doesn’t know is that the murders were a professional hit commissioned at the highest levels of French government. The pseudonymous Jay has woven threads of police procedural, espionage, rural noir, “acts of barbarism,” and Gallic charm into a story that will be a great fit for almost any crime fan. Mazarelle is a memorable flic—hulking, disheveled, intuitive, and world-weary. The hitman is an East German who has ardently embraced capitalism and conspicuous consumption (the book is set in 1999). The American daughter of two of the victims arrives to ask some pointed questions, and she is strikingly attractive, smart, and very direct; and the natives of the Dordogne are engagingly and quirkily French. This is the start of a series, and the only disappointing note is that, upon dispatching the killer, Mazarelle returns to Paris. It’s likely that many readers would love to spend more time in Jay’s Dordogne.— Thomas Gaughan

AMAZON Reviews
                 

A Fine Detective Literary Thriller

May 1, 2012
               

 Descriptively packaged, wrapped-up in Graham Green intrigue, & tied-off in a Richard Condon bow/A special present for the reader to open and enjoy.

The Paris Directive opens with/the elegant Frau Dr. Sachs, her shoulder-length hair dyed the color of a concert grand, stepping off an elevator, with ...a palm to the small of her back, sending her screaming down the shaft, her shrieks tailing after her like a torn parachute.
Soon after the reader is in the halls of power just as a political plot begins to unfold. Klaus Reiner, who recently gave the finishing touch to Dr. Sachs, is employed for some more finishing touches in the higher realms of capital & influence. An ill wind has now been set, blowing toward the small French village of Taziac, where the aging Inspector Paul Mazarelle is about to have his world changed once again.
He was a Paris detective/Born and bred from its sounds, its smells, he had a career there, a job that meant something. It was the one place in the world in which he felt most alive, most in tune with his flesh, and every day was a throw of the dice. But his young wife, terminally ill with cancer, wants to go to the village where she'd grown up to die. He leaves Paris and is transferred.
With her death Mazarelle is at a cross roads.
But before he can even make a decision, he finds himself in a situation where he must bring his game quickly back to speed; as the village league, or even the Paris league experience he has, may not be enough - for the globalized international fields of play.

The novel has a light touch of the urban Sicilian police Inspector Salvo Montalbano; in that the setting is urban, the police force small, the politics local. All of this, and more, adding to its localized 'character'.
Klaus begins laying out the groundwork in the village to assassinate an elitist calibre vacationer. But things don't exactly go according to plan, and the pace starts picking up even more, the suspense then continues to build, and with the continued added twists - the reader can't turn the pages fast enough.                                                                            -- R.A.Barricklow

Engrossing and Compelling Detective Story Set in the French Countryside

May 19, 2012

"The Paris Directive" is an engrossing and compelling detective story set in the French countryside where a Parisian detective has resettled to deal with his grief at the death of his wife. The reader knows from the outset that at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, an assassin has been hired to kill someone. The blond assassin dyes his hair dark brown and travels to this quaint village. He is diabolically cunning and sets about framing a worker of Arab descent who happens to be a rather nasty man too (a wife beater). Instead of killing just the one intended victim, this sociopath assassin brutally slays two wealthy middle-aged vacationing couples. Three bodies slaughtered with knives are found in their rented house. The missing husband of one of the women is immediately suspected. It isn't until Detective Mazarelle steps in that the true picture of what happened unfolds. One of the victims' daughter, a Manhattan attorney, travels to France to claim the bodies of her parents and this character lends additional excitement and intrigue. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and the various references author Gerald Jay incorporated into the story to lend the aura of authenticity to the plot.  

                                                                                              --G.K. Libbey

Intelligent and Fast-Paced
June 5, 2012

The hero of this cat and mouse mystery, Inspector Paul Mazarelle, is a totally original creation, being middle-aged, overweight and with "AVO" tattooed on his right bicep. AVO stands for amor vincit omnia. He has a somewhat depressed mustache, giving him a sense of gravitas. Mazarelle is even a bit on the lazy side until his interest is peaked. He smokes a pipe, sips on Cognac in the middle of the day, loves sausages and is more of a beagle than a greyhound. Not your usual sleuth, but a very appealing one.

Mazarelle has the usual somewhat dumb policeman side-kick, one Bernard Duboit. The inspector teases him, noting the young man's receding hair "you'll be as bald as a hubcap before you're thirty." But Mazarelle is pleasant, even earthy and moves into the murder investigation like a bulldozer and you would not like to be in his way.

Mazarelle's enemy is the ruthless killer Klaus Reiner who will bump off anybody for a price, a high price. In the first chapter you see him in action: a judge who killed a girl with his car and then left the scene, finds there had been a witness to the accident. The judge pays Reiner to get rid of her. Reiner niftily disposes of her down an elevator shaft when she thinks she is stepping out on to her regular floor. A very resourceful killer we have here. He even is an expert on mushrooms, combing the woods to find the deadly death cap, the ingestion of which is a really awful way to die.

The two antagonists Reiner and Mazarelle, the former like a steel knife, honed, ready to strike, the latter like a comfortable but sturdy old shoe, lead the reader on a merry chase. However, this is not a murder mystery because we know who the villain is. The mechanics of the chase, the strategy involved in catching a very slippery bad-guy are the structure of this novel.

Author Jay is well-informed across many disciplines and when two couples, one American one Canadian are brutally murdered in their rented home in Tazaic (a fictitious French town) Inspector Marazelle digs in his heels. The ramifications of the murders are global, the crime is political as one of the murdered men, Schuyler Phillips, was CEO of Tornade, a huge company making jet planes and fast locomotives. We learn that two former French Intelligence agents had hired professional assassin Reiner to kill Phillips. However, the unsuspecting wife of Phillips and the American couple barge in just as Phillips is being iced so they must die, too.

Into the plot steps attractive Molly Reece, the district attorney daughter of one of the murdered couples. She is not anywhere near as good a character as Mazarelle but she adds to the liveliness of the plot and she is in Taziac asking questions about the murder of her parents. The novel proceeds at a fast pace and has a satisfying ending. Even Michou, Mazzarelle's "smug grossly overweight" cat although perhaps losing a couple of her nine lives manages to survive.

Although not a who dunnit "The Paris Directive" is well written and interesting with lots of twists and turns in a complicated stew of international intrigue. Inspector Mazarelle is the lynch-pin that holds the novel together and he is an attractive protagonist that you can't help liking and sympathizing with.                                                                                         --P.B. Sharp

If you like Poirot, Marshal Guarnaccia or Aurelio Zen, this is for you!!

June 21, 2012

From our introduction in Berlin to [Klaus] Reiner, killer for hire, to diplomatic disaster at the Elysee Palace to a small fictional village in Dordogne, this murder mystery driven by international intrigue never ceases to entertain. Written as the first in a series featuring Inspector Paul Mazarelle, formerly of Paris but now living in Taziac, Mazarelle must bring all his skills to bear when a grisly quadruple homicide occurs in the sleepy tourist region.

Both the killer and the inspector find things difficult when Molly, a New York City district attorney and daughter of two of the victims, arrives to identify the bodies and stays to investigate the crime. Reiner's foil for the crimes is a local Arab handyman and as doubts to the handyman's guilt occur, Reiner must return to make sure the handyman's guilt is maintained. This isn't a simple murder for hire; it is more like a chess game.

I really enjoyed this book: it was well written, had a rich and satisfying cast of characters and a great plot. I look forward to seeing more of Inspector Mazarelle.              --trp 

                                                                                                               

MYSTERY TRIBUNE   5.0 review
May 17, 2012

We recently received "The Paris Directive", a debut novel by Gerald Jay, from the publisher Nan A. Talese (Random House) and were really impressed by the quality and the elegant use of language which this author demonstrated in his book. What comes next is our take on this exciting novel and first in Inspector Mazarelle series which is scheduled to be released on June 19, 2012.

 A Brief Summary: 

In a Berlin hotel room in the late 1990s, two former French intelligence agents hire Klaus Reiner, a ruthlessly effective killer, to eliminate an American industrialist vacationing in southwestern France. Reiner easily locates his target in the small Dordogne village of Taziac, but the hit is compromised when three innocent people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Inspector Paul Mazarelle. Formerly of Paris but now living in Taziac, the inspector is charged with bringing his experience and record of success in the capital to bear on the gruesome quadruple homicide at the height of tourist season.
Both Mazarelle’s investigation and Reiner’s job become complicated when Molly, a New York City district attorney and daughter of two of the victims, arrives to identify the bodies and begins asking questions. All evidence points to Ali Sedak, a local Arab handyman, but Mazarelle and Molly have doubts, forcing Reiner to return to Taziac to ensure they see things as he arranged them. Little does anyone in the picturesque French countryside know how politically charged this crime is: its global ramifications, stemming from the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, could overshadow everything.

Our Take: 

This is a very refreshing story with a style which we have not usually seen from American authors: The book has a European flavor with most of the story happening in relatively small towns in France. The lead character reminded us a little of Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret. Character development is very strong and quite a bit of detail is provided on the life of Inspector Mazarelle and his personal challenges, his past life in Paris and his dead wife.
But beyond all these, there is something in the way the author writes his dialogues and shapes the characters that made us love the book.

 Our Rating: 5.0

Gerald Jay is truly a master in elegant use of language and a bright star in the world of crime fiction.

           This is one of those books that we really loved.

 

Exit: Guy, the Fire Chief

                                                     Ionesco's The Bald Soprano- BRAT productions
                                                              Photo: chrisKPhotography  

      Inspector Paul Mazarelle knows dysfunctional families intimately—his own and his wife Martine’s. The first time the young Paul saw his father Guy on the stage, he thought he was a god. Guy was the tall, handsome Fire Chief in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, a role he played at the small Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris for his entire career. Though he fancied himself a peacock, he was only a bit player. Paul did not see his father very often. And one day Guy walked out on the boy and his mother, and never came back.

     When the American tourists, Judy and Ben Reece, come to Mazarelle’s commissariat in the Dordogne to report a theft, the Inspector notes the rise in rural crime. “Families nowdays fall apart like wet tissue paper,” he says, no doubt remembering his absentee father. Judy likes Mazarelle’s sad sympathetic brown eyes, his droopy mustache. She knows that his pretty young wife, Martine, recently died of cancer. The Inspector, she fears, may need more help than they do. Had she known that Liberation once called him "the Swiss Army knife of detectives," she'd have thought otherwise.

The Dark Side of The Dordogne

 

                                                Hotel Adlon Kempinski, Berlin. Photo: Panagiotis Fotiadis
 
             I had read and enjoyed Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. But even the darkest clouds hovering over his English pioneers and their cranky, two-hundred-year-old French farmhouse produce little more than Mistral winds, frozen pipes, and loose roof tiles falling like dandruff. I wanted something darker.

            Then one rainy afternoon while sitting in the luxurious lobby of Berlin’s Hotel Adlon sipping tea I saw my man. The smartly dressed self-absorbed young German who would become Klaus Reiner, the villain of The Paris Directive. He was tall, well-built  and attractive in that insolent Aryan style. Waiting by the elevators, he was going upstairs to what seemed to be an eagerly anticipated appointment. Something in his expression held me—was it his preoccupied sardonic smile? The curious intensity of his inner gaze? In my novel he would be on his way to suite 501 to meet Emile Pellerin and his partner Hubert Blond, and collect perhaps the biggest jackpot of his life.   

            A product of post-unification Germany, Klaus Reiner is a successful businessman with a warped capitalist dream. If Rupert Murdoch could think of buying Manchester United, why couldn’t Reiner own his own team too? He dreams of one day acquiring Bayern Munchen--the most successful football club in the new Germany.  All he needs is enough money. And money is what he earns through his work. Reiner’s metier is murder, his method controlled “accidents” free of all incriminating traces. But in the course of his visit to France, Reiner will discover that the violent way of murder is unexpectedly enjoyable, exciting, even liberating. In Taziac, the businessman-assassin is untethered. Moving beyond his initial target, Reiner will enter a surreal zone without rules, or limits, and become truly scary—even to himself.

          To Inspector Paul Mazarelle, Reiner’s fate may be tied to his own.

Holing Up in Trémolat

 Le Vieux Logis is in the tiny village of Trémolat, a small cozy hotel on the banks of the Dordogne River. An ideal place to hole up while imagining life and events not far away in Taziac. The hotel and grounds are idyllic and the inventive cuisine of the Logis’s restaurant has been called by some “remarkable.” After my first dinner there, I thought so too. Though the foie gras served with champagne at the Élysée had been excellent, the foie gras served with a fig preserve at the Logis was the best I’d ever tasted, ambrosial. The delicious meal was accompanied by a Bergerac dry white-–magic caught  in a bottle. Amazingly, the wine had the same exquisite smell as the pergola grapes in the hotel garden.

Though the Logis doesn’t appear in The Paris Directive, it’s the sort of place the two retired French secret agents in my novel would have loved. Especially Emile Pellerin, who fancies himself a gourmand. In retirement, Pellerin and his friend Hubert Blond are hardly on vacation. They’ve opened a somewhat shady consulting business in Paris. Assignments like the tricky but lucrative one they’ve just received from an old friend at the Foreign Ministry have comfortably supported their expensive tastes. In fact pay much better than their old work at the DGSE. With luck, this new job may even provide enough for the elegant résidence secondaire at the top of their wish list. First, though, they must deal with the man from Berlin. If he’s as difficult as they’ve been told, it won’t be easy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Enter: The President

One intoxicating autumn afternoon in Paris a few years back, I found myself among a group of  foreign art-world visitors at an Élysée Palace reception.  For me, it was simply a stopover on my way to the Dordogne. The plan, to work on my as yet untitled novel about a French detective. His name Inspector Paul Mazarelle.

Although this visit was brief, not to mention impromptu, it proved memorable. The Salle de Fête--its chairs and flowers gold and wine-red--was festive, lively, and quite crowded when Jacques Chirac, the President of the  Républic made his appearance. A tall poised good-looking man with the voice and gestures of a trained actor, he welcomed his audience, inviting his guests to enjoy their stay. He’d attended ÉNA and been polished by one of France’s most elite graduate schools. He assumed he was charming, and he was right.

I had no idea at the time that he would soon be making a cameo in my new novel. There in the face of a sudden political emergency,  he’d appear grim, tight-lipped, seething--a seemingly different man.

Madame Charpentier's Baguettes

“And that this place may thoroughly be thought

            True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.”

            In Taziac, the bakery down the gravel-covered road is surrounded by hanging baskets of flowers. You might think it’s a florist shop if not for the partially obscured sign on the front window that says Boulangerie-Patisserie. It’s owned by the white-haired Madame Louise Charpentier. Though she’s become a bit cranky in her old age, during WWII she was a celebrated hero of the Resistance and a Communist in the Maurice Thorez mode. Despite her rhumatisme and being set in her ways, she still makes the best bread in town.

            Inspector Paul Mazarelle, who lives nearby, is one of her good friends. Since the death of his wife, he often drops by in the morning for coffee and a tartelette before going on to work at the commissariat in Bergerac. The Inspector’s dirty breakfast dishes are still on the small table in front when Ben and Judy Reece come in. Everything in the bakery looks and smells wonderful to the two vacationing Americans. But where is everybody? Hearing something against the outside glass, Judy glances up at the scruffy-looking, unshaven young man staring at her through the window and feels a chill. He has the most compelling blue eyes she’s ever seen.

A Town Called Taziac

There’s a drinking song at the start of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman that’s hard to forget. It’s about a dwarf with a hump, and a nose that’s coal black…

            “Et ses jambes, ses jambes faisaient clic clac! clic clac! clic clac!

            Voilà, voilà Kleinzach!”

            A catchy name.  Reminding me of the first time I drove through the Dordogne where it seemed all the picturesque villages and towns had a similar “ac” suffix. (Kevin Elstob, in his blog, describes this linguistic curiosity of the region as an echo "of the Roman presence in that part of the world.") There was Ribérac, Plazac, Montbazillac, Fanlac, Saussignac, Tourtoirac, Montignac, Issigeac, Beynac, Beynac-et-Cazenac, Bergerac, and many more. W.S. Gilbert  would have loved that trip. The countryside looked and smelled good too. Lush fields of wild flowers, daffodils, sunflowers.

            The Dordogne River has such an elegant curving stately sweep that it was hard not to be attracted to the region, its castles, and the history that has grown up around them. Later, when I began to write The Paris Directive, I decided to call the village in my novel Taziac. Like so many of the towns mentioned above, I imagined Taziac as still showing signs of its medieval past. The remaining cobbled streets, half-timbered houses, the towered chateaux, and an open market place behind the Gothic church in the main square. A perfect Eden in which to relax and heal urban wounds, sharp words, the tedium of the every day. In short, a vacation paradise for the foreign visitors who will arrive soon after the curtain goes up in The Paris Directive.