Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Tracee de Hahn

People think of watches, and they think of Switzerland.   Artisans in Holland and France were the premier watchmakers in the sixteenth century, but then the Swiss overtook them and never looked back.

The watch industry comes into play in the cleverly titled A Well-Timed Murder, the second in a series featuring Swiss-American detective Agnes Lüthi.  Agnes is a member of the Financial Crimes department in the Lausanne police department, currently on leave as she recovers from the wound she received in the first novel.  As the book opens she is at Baselworld, the world’s premier watch and jewelry trade show, overlooking the arrest of a much-wanted thief, when she is asked to investigate a week-old suspicious death.

Guy Chavanon, one of the country’s master watchmakers, died several days before the show opened, and a police investigation concurred with what every eyewitness agreed had happened:  Guy, who had a well-known life-threatening allergy to peanuts, somehow had ingested peanut dust or spores and died within seconds.  A frantic attempt by his friend, Narendra Patel, to inject him with an Epi-Pen didn’t work, and Chavanon died in front of a horrified group of teachers and parents at a reception at his son’s boarding school.  It was simply a tragic accident according to everyone except his daughter Christine; she suspects murder.

Guy had been working on an invention that he said would change the watch-making world, much as quartz did in the 1970s.  Because he was inordinately secretive, no one knew exactly what this invention was or where its explanatory notes were located.

Further complicating matters after Guy’s death is the disagreement between Christine and his wife Marie, Christine’s stepmother.  Although Christine had left the family’s firm of Perrault et Chavanon Frères several years earlier over a disagreement with her father about the company’s direction, she now wants to find out what he was working on and is hoping to bring it to fruition.  However, Marie wants to sell the generations-old firm immediately, and the two of them cannot come to any agreement about the future.

In addition, at Baselworld Agnes sees Julien Vallotton, a man she met several months previously on a case that involved his family.  It’s obvious that Julian is interested in her, but Agnes is conflicted.  She likes him, but dealing with the recent death of her husband and the anticipated reactions of her two young sons and her mother-in-law to Julien make it difficult for her to act on any attraction.  But Julien’s close relationship with the Chavanon family, in his role as Guy’s son’s godfather, makes it nearly impossible to avoid him.

Tracee de Hahn is breaking new ground in placing her detective, and a woman detective at that, in Lausanne’s police department.  Judging from Agnes’ ability in solving the deaths in A Well-Timed Murder, she will be solving more crimes in that city in the future.

Tracee de Hahn studied architecture and European history and lived for several years in Switzerland.  You can read more about her at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

There’s not much in the way of crime fiction coming from Switzerland compared to other European countries.  So Tracee de Hahn’s debut novel, Swiss Vendetta, is definitely a welcome addition to the international mystery genre.

Agnes Lüthi has just been transferred to the Violent Crimes division of the Lausanne Police Department from its Financial division.  She’s pleased yet anxious about her new position, and she’s still mourning the recent death of her husband.  On her first day at her new job, the worst blizzard in the city’s history is covering Lausanne and its environs with freezing temperatures, biting winds, and whiteout conditions.  But crime doesn’t respect the weather, and Agnes is called to investigate a murder.  It’s her first homicide case, and the conditions could not be worse.

The murder has taken place at the Chateau Vallatton, home to the region’s wealthiest and most prominent family.  The victim, a visitor named Felicity Cowell, was an appraiser for a London auction house, and she was in the process of valuing the hundreds of valuable items that the Vallatton family had amassed over the centuries.  But something made Felicity leave the mansion that morning, bizarrely dressed in an evening gown and a man’s coat, and go out into the blizzard.  What was it?

At first glance it’s hard to tell what happened to Felicity, given that her body is stuck to the ice.  But when she is finally moved, a knife wound is revealed; now there’s no doubt it was murder.

The small investigative presence at the murder site is not what should have been.  The chief of the station, Inspector Bardy, is stranded elsewhere because of the storm.  André Petit is the village policeman without much homicide experience, preoccupied because his wife is going into labor with their first child.  The other three men on the scene simply happened to be at the local hotel bar when the call came in reporting the murder, and so they went to the chateau to provide at least a semblance of officialdom:  Robert Carnet, Agnes’s former supervisor in Financial Crimes; Dr. Blanchard, a local physician; and Frédéric Estanguest, an elderly villager who leads the two others up the mountain under the terrible weather conditions.

Not one of these men, nor Agnes, is experienced in investigating a murder.  But they’ll have to do their best.

Matters aren’t helped by the people in the chateau.  The only permanent resident is the marquise, Antoinette Vallatton de Torney, who barely acknowledges knowing the deceased.  Her late brother’s two sons do not live in the mansion but both, along with the wife of the younger brother, are there at the moment.  Neither brother seems to have a reason for the murder, and the younger one is in a wheelchair, making it virtually impossible for him to have gone out in the snow and killed Felicity Cowell.

The blizzard is one more obstruction for Agnes Lüthi.  She is freezing cold, both physically and mentally, throughout the novel–first, obviously, by the raging storm; second, by her internal despair over her husband’s unexpected and unexplained suicide.  How can she ever hope to solve this case, she wonders, when she has been unable to decipher any clues about why her husband, to whom she was closer than anyone else in the world, willingly left her and their two young sons?

Tracee de Hahn has written a compelling first novel, with, I hope, many more to follow.  You can read more about her at this web site.

Read the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.