A MURDER IN SPRINGTIME

Vézère Valley police chief Bruno Courrèges tries multitasking, with mixed results.

When his good friend Pamela Nelson finds her lodger, Josette Quirit, bludgeoned to death on the patio, Bruno knows that his friendship with Pamela requires him to recuse himself from the investigation. He’s OK with his self-imposed exclusion, since he has other things to occupy him. Like Brittany’s Commissaire Dupin and Provence’s Chief Magistrate Antoine Verlaque, he enjoys cooking elegant meals for his love interest, although the elusive Laura Segret repeatedly ditches Bruno’s dinners for work. He also hatches an ingenious scheme to revitalize St. Denis’ shrinking farmers market, which earns him a combination of compliments and complaints from the actual farmers. And when Pamela is cleared as a suspect, he’s able to join the hunt for Josette’s killer. That’s where Walker seems to lose the plot, quite literally. The police are sure that “Josette Quirit” is not the dead woman’s real name. But instead of running her fingerprints, which would have exposed her true identity immediately, or asking the senior citizen who claims to be her cousin by marriage for help identifying her, they begin a convoluted process of triangulating pings from cellphone towers and interviewing members of a Netflix TV crew filming in a neighboring village. Even when they get a confession, they’re not sure they have the right culprit. The wild-goose chase, which is long enough to produce a ton of foie gras, ends up yielding a tablespoon of chopped liver.

Walker’s police chief, a good fellow with a kind heart and decent detective instincts, deserves better than this.