I could not get over the suspense in this novel, THE FROZEN DEAD written by Bernard Minier. Each chapter had me on the edge waiting to find the next big clue to a well-done mystery. From the prologue to the end I was mesmerized.
Martin Servaz is a cop who was in the middle of an investigation of a murder of a homeless man when he gets a call to investigate a crime that is so bizarre he wonders how this could be more important. Then a string of other events happen. His job is to find out how they are all related.
First, the body of a horse is found decapitated hanging from cables at a power plant. In the mix of trying to figure out why someone would do something so cruel, a body is found a few days later hanging from a bridge. This has turned out to be no suicide but murder. Is it a coincidence or are they related? More clues show up involving a patient from the nearby Wargnierb Institute, a psychiatric hospital with maximum security and another murder. Will Martin Servaz find the answers before it is too late?
At the same time, Diane Berg is a psychologist on her way to the Wargnierb Institute to work with the patients in Unit A, the most dangerous of all criminals. Dr. Xavier does not welcome her for unknown reasons that she is unable to figure out. Her work has her to study as his assistant to the worst of cases including Julian Hirtmann. There is something unnerving about the whole situation that leaves her wondering if any of this has to do with the surrounding murders in the area.
The imagination that went into this novel will be hard to match. Bernard Minier did an exceptional job with THE FROZEN DEAD and keeping my attention! With an ending I did not expect, I have to say this novel is a must to read for the fall.
In a snowbound valley, deep in the French Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylums's director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing from within the fortified institution while someone seems to be slipping out at night. Commandant Martin Servaz, a charismatric, Toulouse city cop fond of quoting Latin, can’t believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor who is accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the corpse... and a few days later the first human murder takes place. Servaz and his colleague, the mysterious Irene Ziegler, must use all their skill to solve the terrifying mystery.
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