The Body in the Castle Well

Thanks to Bruno's dog, Balzac, a rich American art student is found dead at the bottom of a deep well in an ancient hilltop castle. The young woman, Claudia, had been working in the archives of an eminent French art historian, a crippled Resistance war hero and an expert on the French Renaissance, at his art-filled chateau. As Claudia's grieving mother arrives in St Denis and her family's White House connections get the US Embassy and the FBI involved, Bruno tries to trace the people and events that led to her death - or was it murder? Bruno learns that Claudia had been trying to buy the chateau and art collection of her tutor, even while her researches led her to suspect that some of his attributions may have been forged. This takes Bruno down a trail that leads him from the ruins of Berlin in 1945, where a French SS soldier won the last Knight's Cross that Hitler awarded, to France's colonial war in Algeria and the OAS extremists who tried to assassinate De Gaulle. The long arm of French history has reached out to find a new victim, but can Bruno identify the killer - and prove his case?