The 3 best books by Jean-Luc Bannalec

Nothing is accidental in a pseudonym. Have a German publisher and author like Jörg Bong sign his books as Jean Luc Bannalec it has a lot to do with staying in tune with settings and characters. Something like that the creator of Sherlock Holmes in his London could not be called Antoine Favre. In the case of Bong, taking French Brittany as a scenario, everything had to be in tune.

Then there is its fundamental protagonist, a Dupin that evokes the first Dupin created by Edgar Allan Poe to investigate the dark cases born from the imaginary of the tormented narrator. In this case, the inspiration remains, the nod to the darkest policeman, the reminiscence in every reader who more willingly assumes direct connection or subliminal reinforcement.

As a result, a series of works 100% Dupin focused on destiny as curator of the protagonist, a Concarneau made capital of this hybrid of German handwriting and French noir staging. Crime novels of great success throughout Europe.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Jean-Luc Bannalec

The mystery of Pont-Aven

It is clear. For a saga to work and for its author to lavish on continuations that will soon reach their tenth installment (at least in Germany). The coup d'état of this novel was part of the studied characterization of the whole, author and work and progresses from reader to reader from an execution that compensates for the purest police force centered on deduction and the black that plunges us into the darkness of crime or rather in the darkness of wills capable of killing for any kind of interest ...

In his retreat from greater Paris to the remote coastal town of Concarneau, Dupin curses his fate and ruminates on the disaster of his degradation, half by his means of investigation, half by the interest of God knows what powers are buried. But Concarneau is preparing like the perfect storm. When Georges Dupin thinks that he is going to die of boredom in that place, a corpse transforms the placid summer of Sundays and second homes into a new case to be revealed. The brutality of the crime points to a vindictive instinct without measure. Because the victim, an old man could not appear as a robbery victim offering resistance ...

Things get even more rare when a new victim appears as if to close a circle of crime, a secret that seems to be completely sealed in the mouths of the inhabitants of Pont Aven. Let's start to suppose, let's investigate with Dupin, let's be surprised by his methods, let's live the tension of a closed community on evil as if it were justice...

The mystery of Pont-Aven

Disappearance in Trégastel

Jean-Luc Bannalec is to German black literature what Lorenzo Silva to the Spanish. Both share age and in both cases they are authors whose forays into the black genre are always received with reader joy.

In the case of Jörg Bong, real name of Jean-Luc Bannalec, has managed to build a unique character, Inspector Dupin and win over German readers and readers around the world with novels brimming with the ingenuity necessary to tackle the creation of a detective novel with the dark tints that they mark the sign of the times of this genre.

Now comes to Spain the sixth installment of a saga always recommended to enter a fascinating police setting with classic reminiscences and that always pleasant impression of durability that the sagas give to plots and protagonists.

Inspector Dupin, a Parisian but active in Concarneau and still seen as a stranger to the locals of a French Brittany with his own idiosyncrasy, is a kind of sagacious, skillful new hero accompanied by a great team with which to undo any wrong. But this time the case will catch him a little off…

Dupín is on a forced vacation in Trégastel, but he knows that the world continues to shelter the most twisted minds capable of anything for evil purposes and interests. Even in that fatuous dedication to rest, Dupin will be approaching little mysteries that do not point at all to some tragic aspect of his idle life. Until the corpse on duty appears to return it to a harsh reality that in part it yearns for ...

Perhaps it is more about Dupin acting as a magnet for evil. An evil that is weaving around his vacation retreat in a hotel with views of the calmer sea in whose chicha calm the warnings of the storm can be sensed.

What appears as a small challenge, a secondary investigation with which to occupy his time on the well-known French coast of Armor, ends up becoming an obscure matter on which Dupin will have to move with leaden feet, since it does not concern him at all in those Holidays.

And the views from the pink granite coast to the sea become darker as the storm finally arrives. And the hotel is acquiring a gloomy air between characters that are becoming more strange, as possessors of unspeakable secrets.

A novel that fuses the wonders of a unique space with that duality that always unfolds over everything that is perfect and that ultimately points to the most perverse of the world of crime.

Disappearance in Trégastel

A corpse in Port du Bélon

I rescue the fourth installment here. A plot in which we start without knowing if we have a body or not. Because the notice of a death in Port du Belón seems more like Dupin's desire to focus on something interesting. But there are those who insist on ensuring that he saw the dead man.

It is surely the novel furthest from the general line of the saga, with its horizon in search of the criminal on duty blurred to become at times a work of psychological penetration into the modus vivendi of this particular area of ​​French Brittany.

And yet, the tension is always there, offering us glimpses of what may have really happened. Our commissioner Dupin takes us through his typical world of contrasts that awakens strange shadows hanging over any of the characters involved.

A corpse in Port du Bélon

Other recommended books by Jean-Luc Bannalec

A mystery in Aber Wrac'h

With his usual nostalgic hint of the good times of the most detective genre, the author once again makes his inspector Dupin a hero on a tightrope. Because every investigation in which this character is involved ends up placing him in that strange wire where the most shrewd good policemen need to live to carry out their work.

As the Breton summer continues happily into October, the sun is shining and the nights are balmy, Labat suffers a blow of fate. His 89-year-old aunt died at her home after suffering a series of "death omens." The inspector, who was very close to the woman, head of the family clan, visits the old Los Angeles Abbey where the old woman lived, and there she is the victim of a brutal attack.

Shocked by what has happened, Inspector Dupin and his team move to the Aber Wrac'h and take charge of the investigation together with Commander Carman of the local gendarmerie. The old woman lived on a large property with an apple plantation and an orchard of aromatic and medicinal plants in which they find a mandrake, which is discovered as the cause of the woman's death.

Do the pages torn from her birdwatching notebook have anything to do with the death of Labat's aunt? What secrets are the other family members hiding?

A mystery in Aber Wrac'h

Two deaths in Belle-Île

While Brittany is experiencing one of the hottest August months in its history, a corpse appears attached to a buoy near Concarneau. This is Patric Provost, a wealthy and despotic businessman from Belle-Île, owner of land, real estate and even a sheep farm. Dupin and his assistants find out that all but one house in Islonk, a tiny village in the southwest of the island, belonged to the dead man.

They soon discover that Provost's ex-wife, from whom he had been separated for twenty years although they were not divorced, and the mayor, embarked on an ambitious green energy project that would provide energy independence to the place, are the main beneficiaries of the inheritance. . Just then a kidnapping takes place and another corpse turns up.

Commissioner Dupin has little more than twenty-four hours to solve a new case before attending the party that Nolween and his colleagues have organized to celebrate their ten years in Brittany.

Two deaths in Belle-Île
5/5 - (13 votes)

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