Das hat mir gut gefallen. Endlich mal wieder ein Polizist, der nicht total kaputt und kein Arschloch ist! Und mit einem tollen Team. Ein bisschen Privatleben hat er auch, ist er doch Vater einer 17-jährigen Tochter.
Ich werde diese Serie auf jeden Fall weiterverfolgen. Einige der späteren Bücher habe ich ja schon gehört/gelesen.

Merged review:

Das hat mir gut gefallen. Endlich mal wieder ein Polizist, der nicht total kaputt und kein Arschloch ist! Und mit einem tollen Team. Ein bisschen Privatleben hat er auch, ist er doch Vater einer 17-jährigen Tochter.
Ich werde diese Serie auf jeden Fall weiterverfolgen. Einige der späteren Bücher habe ich ja schon gehört/gelesen. ( )

The Frozen Dead. Bernard Minier. 2011. I thought this was going to be a “Silence of the Lambs-type” book, but it was a police procedural set in the Pyrenees.There is a hideous psychotic locked up in a creepy asylum for the criminally insane who may be involved in a series of gruesome murders but the focus is on the hunt. When a headless horse is found on hanging on a cliff, Martin Servas, the brilliant Latin quoting commandant from Toulouse comes over to work with Irene Ziegler a small tough police woman who wears leather and rides a motorcycle I love French police procedurals and this is a good one. There are lots of plot twists and surprises. It is violent and the life styles of some of the characters are not traditional, It is a series and I hope the other books are as suspenseful ( )

Saint-Martin-de-Comminges is a small town nestled in the French Pyrenees. The kind of place where winters are harsh and unforgiving and where nothing ever happens.
Until the winter morning when a group of workers discover the headless, flayed body of a horse, hanging suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff.
On the same day the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high-security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylum’s director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing from within the fortified institution while someone seems to be slipping out at night.

Commandant Martin Servaz, a charismatic city cop from nearby Toulouse fond of quoting Latin, can’t believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there’s something disturbing about this crime that he can’t ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor, accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the horse carcass . . . and a few days later the first human murder takes place. A dark story of madness and revenge seems to be unfolding.

Servaz and his colleague, the mysterious Irene Ziegler, must use all their skill to solve the terrifying mystery and best one of the most fiendish and clever opponents they could ever imagine..

Loved this atmospheric thriller that read like a Scandi noir. Beginning is a bit slow, confusing but be patient it soon develops at a steady pace that keeps you turning the pages.

Great sense of place, you can feel the cold seeping off the page. I hope to meet Commandant Servaz again in the near future....


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Fabulous reading. The locale is unusual, beautiful, written about in vivid description. The opening chapter is pure win. The characters are well fleshed out and interesting, you want to read more about them. ( )

Inspector Servaz is not happy to be called off the violent murder of a homeless man to investigate the mutilation of a horse even if it happens to be the favourite animal of a multi-millionaire. However, the crime is so bizarre , he becomes intrigued despite himself – the beheaded corpse of the horse has been left suspended from a cable car terminus at a power plant. Despite the obvious fact that this would have required a great deal of effort, the guards at the plant claim to have no idea how the horse got up there. As Servaz digs further into the horse and its owners, it becomes clear that all of this is somehow linked to a nearby physichiatric hospital which houses some of the most notorious serial killers in Toulouse as well as to a series of teenaged suicides that occurred years earlier.

The Frozen Dead is the debut novel by French author Bernard Minier and it is dark, atmospheric and chilling. Set in the Pyrenees in the dead of winter, cold, in both character and weather, plays an important role throughout. The characters, themselves, are well-drawn and believable. The story begins slowly, giving the reader time to appreciate the strange nature of the crime but quickly builds in tension and red herrings until the explosive denouement. This is the kind of tale that, once started, is almost impossible to put down so be warned, this is a fairly long book clocking in at almost 500 pages, so be prepared for a couple of sleepless night. ( )