The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd

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You can buy The Unwanted Dead.....Here

You can follow Chris Lloyd......................Here

You can follow Orion Publishing..............Here

The Blurb..,

Paris, Friday 14th June 1940. The day the Nazis march into Paris, making headlines around the globe. Paris police detective Eddie Giral – a survivor of the last World War – watches helplessly on as his world changes forever. But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim. To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was. 

All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home…

My Review...

Chris Lloyd has succeeded brilliantly on two fronts with this novel, location and character. 

The cover of the book is great in that it truly conveys the situation. It is Paris but it is upside down. It's Paris but not as Eddie (our anti-hero) knows it. The majority of the population has fled, leaving old folks, crooks and refugees. Into this mix add the German occupying army and nazi enforcers and it makes for an explosive cocktail. It's dark, it's empty, it's moody. It has commandeered hotels and sleazy clubs where German Officers and organised crime rub shoulders. It's not a matter of who he can trust, Eddie knows he can trust no-one but he has to distrust some more than others. The author sets the scene beautifully. 

The author has also created a tough, vulnerable, relentless, thug of an honest cop in Eddie Giral. Eddie is a war veteran with all that entails. Eddie is determined to track down the killer of four Polish refugees. His investigations lead him to Wermacht Officers, the Gestapo, the Resistance, corrupt police officers and an  American journalist. The tightrope Eddie has to walk becomes smaller and smaller  Everyone has a dark secret and Eddie's got a couple that he keeps his close to his chest. He is so self destructive that he had to leave the woman and child he loves in case they caught in his explosive perimeter. Another quality that Eddie posseses is durability, the poor bloke has had more pastings than Mike Tyson' s sparring partner. Everyone wants a pop at him.

The author has obviously done his research with regards to the occupation of Paris (also has an interesting piece re research at the end of the book.) and  has slotted the murder mystery neatly into the historical background like a hand into a glove.

This book has got a bit of everything, murder mystery, crime fiction, spy thriller but its driving force is the location, the history and Eddie. 

Selected Quotes...

"We are more similar than we seem, Edouard. Good men in bad times."

"And bad men in good times"

"I thought again that the Germans were more than prepared for war. It was the peace that had taken them by surprise."

"Next to me at the bar,two prostitutes were eyeing a table full of youthful officers, looking like acne in a uniform."

 "I'd probably have another small scar to call my own, though, so I went to pour myself a glass of whisky to mark the occasion. I looked at the amount left in the bottle and wondered whether I'd be able to afford another scar."

About the Author...

Straight after graduating in Spanish and French, Chris Lloyd hopped on a bus from Cardiff to Catalonia and stayed there for over twenty years. He has also lived in Grenoble - researching the French Resistance movement - as well as in the Basque Country and Madrid, where he taught English and worked in educational publishing and as a travel writer. He now lives in South Wales and is a translator and novelist.

The result of his lifelong interest in World War 2 and resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, The Unwanted Dead (Orion) is his first novel set in Paris, featuring Detective Eddie Giral. Chris is also the author of the Elisenda Domènech crime series (Canelo), featuring a police officer with the newly-devolved Catalan police force.