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by Timothy Williams
April 1990: French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud has been living and working in the French Caribbean département of Guadeloupe for more than a decade, but her days are still full of surprises. She is only just starting to investigate the suspicious suicide of a high-profile environmental activist and media personality when she is pulled off the case. Is it because she was getting too close to the truth?
But the new case she's been assigned takes precedence. The naked body of a white woman has been discovered on a beach. The victim's remains offer no clues about her final hours—she was found without any of her belongings, and it seems she had been dead at least three days before anyone spotted her corpse. What turned this woman's vacation in paradise into a final nightmare?
As always, the story of a murdered white woman attracts international media attention. The pressure is on Anne Marie to solve the murder quickly, before bad publicity destroys the island's all-important tourist industry.
"Absorbing...laden with insights about the legacies of colonialism, such as nuanced racism, official corruption, and troubled interactions between men and women." - Publishers Weekly
"Williams has craftily created her story as a microcosm of Guadeloupe's social situation, where alienation battles dependence and racial stratification rules. Williams digs deep below the exotic setting's surface in this nuanced mystery." - Booklist
"Anne Marie's second appearance, courtesy of the author of the Piero Trotti crime novels, boasts an elegantly incisive narrative and a fascinating heroine." - Kirkus
This information about The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
In addition to Another Sun, his first Anne Marie Laveaud novel set in Guadeloupe, CWA award-winning author Timothy Williams has written five crime novels set in Italy featuring Commissario Piero Trotti: Converging Parallels, The Puppeteer, Persona Non Grata, Black August and Big Italy. In 2011, The Observer named him one of the ten best modern European crime novelists. Born in London and educated at St. Andrews, Williams has taught at the universities of Poitiers in France, Bari and Pavia in Italy, and at Jassy in Romania. He has lived in the French West Indies, where he teaches, since 1980.
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