Read the book! But read this review first. (I know that some people don’t like to read reviews first, but be assured that you won’t find any spoilers here.)

First, though, take this one-question multiple-choice quiz: What do you think Château Rock is? You probably don’t know for sure, so just make your best guess:

1. It’s a new musical genre.
2. It’s the name of an obscure château in France.
3. It’s a wine produced at the vineyard next to that château.
4. It’s the title of a book being reviewed here.

The answer is… all of the above (if you allow fiction and a bit of poetic license). The book being reviewed here is actually The Shooting at Château Rock, a “Bruno, Chief of Police” novel by Martin Walker. I highly recommend it, as I do all of Walker’s books, five of which I have reviewed here in earlier posts.

This series, of which Château Rock is the ≈17th and latest entry, takes place in the Dordogne region of France, and one of the reasons I love these books so much is that Walker captures the setting and the pace of life so well. It almost makes a reader want to move to the Dordogne. (I say “almost,” because if I were to retire to somewhere in Europe it would have to be in Italy, or at the very least Catalonia.) The reason that the first sentence of this paragraph has difficulty numbering the series — saying that this book is approximately #17 — is that it is the 17th novel, but there are various short stories and novellas along the way. In any case, each individual work but especially the series in toto evokes the setting, including the characters, the scenery, the culture, and especially the gastronomy of the area. If you’re looking for a fast-paced mystery, you’re looking in the wrong place. Don’t skip the recipes in the interest of reading more quickly. This isn’t one of those cozies where recipes are thrown in “just because.” Invest the time to read three pages about making dinner, because that’s what will give you the flavor of the region, so to speak. For example:

You will have noticed certain similarities between Walker’s description of preparing/cooking dinner and a carpenter’s description of building/renovating a house as in This Old House. But you might not notice what Walker’s description later on of an aging Scottish rock musician reminded me of — not in the passage above, but in the missing element, his extensive model railroad.

If you know, you know.

Categories: Books, Food & Restaurants, Model Railroading