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Title: The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe

Subtitle: An Anne Marie Laveaud Mystery

Author: Timothy Williams

Narrator: Barbara Rosenblat

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-13-15

Publisher: Recorded Books

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

April 1990, Guadeloupe: The body white female French tourist has been discovered on a nudist beach. The victim's remains offer no clues about her final hours. What turned this woman's vacation in paradise into a final nightmare? French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveau is assigned the high-profile case as a top priority. As always, the story of a murdered white woman has attracted the attention of international media. The economy of Guadeloupe, so dependent on the tourist industry, could suffer a terrible hit if this case isn't brought under control with some quick, impressive police work.

Members Reviews:

Flat mystery filled with racial politics

Before reading The Honest Folk of Guadaloupe, I read the first book about Anne Marie Laveaud,Another Sun. Unfortunately, it was not beneficial to be more familiar with the character as I was even more irritated with her tiresome personality and the disjointed or even rambling style of writing the author employed. But most of all, I felt the mystery element fell flat.

Another Sun takes place in 1980, and The Honest Folk of Guadaloupe in 1990. In between, Laveaud seems to have had a basically uneventful life and the high profile cases she is assigned to in each are, apparently, the only time periods worth reporting on. Her break-up with her husband occurs in Another Sun, where she discovers her pregnancy with her daughter. In the interim, she stays in Guadaloupe. When we meet her again, she is suffering from yet another mysterious physical ailment (although this is not played up nearly as much as it was in Another Sun) and personal drama (her relationship with a married man) while she investigates the death of a young woman: her (intact) corpse is found lying on the beach with no identification.

Her investigation consists of talking to seemingly everyone on the island in order to determine what happened: who is the woman who is found dead, why was she there, and how did she die. Laveaud is herself a "pied noir" (French, born in Algeria) of paternal Jewish ancestry and a transplant to Guadaloupe, as well as the mother of two mixed children with her ex-husband; she has a high-school aged son and a ten year old daughter who appear only a few times in the text but perhaps more frequently in her thoughts. While you might think all these experiences would make her somewhat open minded or slow to stereotype, in fact, she is quite color-conscious and quick to categorize. She makes this claim: "One thing to define people by their color; it's quite another to judge them because of their color" (p 176). Throughout the book, she is indeed quick to define people by their color, which even takes the form of "outing" someone as not "truly" white, despite her pale skin, because of the brownish tinge to a certain two parts of her chest skin revealed when her shirt is off (apparently I cannot name the body part here) and prominent rear end. In fact, the bottom, particularly the black female bottom, is a recurrent theme throughout this book. Discussions about "steatopygous" abound:

"You realized she was of mixed blood?"

Madame Lecurieux laughed. "Her backside's not a white girl's."

"Steatopygous." Anne Marie smiled.