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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2010, 400 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2010, 400 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jo Perry
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A promise made to a dying man leads forensics ace Enzo Macleod to the study which the man's heir has preserved for nearly twenty years. Enzo rashly boasted he could solve the case - but that proves to be more difficult than he thought...
A promise made to a dying man leads forensics ace Enzo Macleod, a Scot who's been teaching in France for many years, to the study which the man's heir has preserved for nearly twenty years. The dead man left several clues there designed to reveal the killer's identity to the man's son, but ironically the son died soon after the father. So begins the fourth of seven cold cases written up in a bestselling book by Parisian journalist Roger Raffin that Enzo rashly boasted he could solve (he's been successful with the first three). It takes Enzo to a tiny island off the coast of Brittany in France, where he must confront the hostility of locals who have no desire to see the infamous murder back in the headlines. An attractive widow, a man charged with but acquitted of the murder--but still the viable suspect, a crime scene frozen in time, a dangerous hell hole by the cliffs, and a collection of impenetrable messages, make this one of Enzo's most difficult cases.
Chapter One Munich, Germany, December 20, 1951
Erik Fleischer was a man who counted his blessings.
His wife was an attractive woman, hair cascading in golden
waves over square shoulders, a smile that lit her inner soul, and
spellbinding blue eyes. Still adoring after five turbulent years.
He had two wonderful children, blond, blue-eyed clones of
their mother. Magda’s genes had predominated over his own
Mediterranean looks.
He had survived the war virtually unscathed, inheriting his
parents’ Bavarian villa in this leafy suburb, establishing a lucrative
practice among the new, burgeoning middle class rising now
out of the ashes of Hitler’s madness.
The good life stretched ahead toward an unbroken horizon.
How could he have known that this night he would lose
everything?
As he sat reading the evening newspaper, he absorbed, almost
unconsciously, the peals of laughter emanating from the dining
room. Mother and children playing a simple board game. He
...
Spending time with Peter May's charming and clever Enzo Macleod in Brittany is pure pleasure. In May's fourth installment of the Enzo Files series, the remote Ile de Groix, with its turbulent coast, rough weather, and laconic and secretive residents, tests Macleod intellectually and physically as he attempts to solve a case so cold it's frigid... If there's a flaw.. it's May's occasional awkward overwriting... Still, the truth hidden inside the mystery of Freeze Frame is fascinating and Enzo Macleod is great fun to hang out with...continued
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(Reviewed by Jo Perry).
Half Italian, half-Scottish forensic expert Enzo Macleod has distinctive good looks: long hair with a streak of white pulled back in a ponytail, and eyes of different colors. This is because Macleod has a genetic syndrome, called Waardenburg Syndrome, affecting hair color, eye pigmentation and sometimes hearing. It's so named for the Dutch eye doctor, Petrus Johannes Waardenburg, who first noticed that people with differently colored eyes often had a hearing impairment, and defined the syndrome in 1951.
Overall, the syndrome affects an estimated 1 in 42,000 people; about 1 in 30 students in schools for the deaf have Waardenburg syndrome. The condition is usually inherited from one parent with the altered gene that carries it, though in ...
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