Picked this up at Powell's in Portland, OR last year and finally getting around to reading it. Set in 1963 Picardie, France, when a truck driver drops off a group of illegals in the night and discovers one has been killed en route. This is the second Inspector Lucas Rocco case.It's probably a very high 4 stars, and also more of a thriller I think than only a police procedural. It became quite intense at the end. It's set in an interesting part of France and I enjoyed the role of the canal system as the plot played out. There's a blurb on the book cover saying you have to love the main policeman, Lucas Rocco, as he's France's answer to Jack Reacher. Which in height and in toughness with criminals and a light touch with people not able to defend themselves may in fact add up to a Reacher type guy. Which is not a bad thing at all.

Death on the Rive Nord (Lucas Rocco, #2)

Picardie, 1963. A truck drops a group of illegal workers by a deserted stretch of canal in the dead of night near Poissons-les-Marais, desperate travellers in a pipeline, searching for a better life. Days later, one of them surfaces, stabbed to death. For Inspector Lucas Rocco, finding the victim's fellow travellers presents problems. Most Algerian immigrants are welcome, but trawling for any who aren't is a sensitive issue loaded with threats of civil unrest - something which terrifies his bosses in the Ministry. And when Rocco is ordered to stay away from one factory where he suspects illegals are employed, it goes against everything he knows. However, his difficulties have barely begun. One of the illegals is a young woman with a small child, on the run from her brutal husband, Samir Farek, an Algerian gangster who has threatened to kill them both. But Farek has another, bigger to take over as gang lord in Paris. With a history of disposing of anyone who crosses him - a fate he is happy to mete out even to a senior policeman who gets in his way - the potential consequences are frightening. Caught between his instinct to protect a vulnerable woman and her child, of obeying bosses interested only in preserving the status quo, and facing the threat of a dangerous gangster who recognises no boundaries in the murderous pursuit of his plans, Rocco begins to wonder how long he can survive.

Inspector Rocco investigates a murder linked to illegal immigration and a dangerous gangster in 1963 France.

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