New posts coming soon

COMING SOON!

 The next Inspector Mazarelle thriller-- this time set at 36 Quai des Orfevres in Paris.
 Keep a sharp eye!

NEW FANS FOR THE PARIS DIRECTIVE

          “Probably one of the toughest things to bring off in a novel,  ESPECIALLY

            a thriller, is charm….

            But, if a writer could pull off charm…with real characters…and a real plot…that

            works as a thriller that actually

           “thrills”…well, sir (or madam, as the case may be) then

            you’ve got a writer!

            AND a book!

            So, when we meet Inspector Mazarelle

            And follow him in his daily, touched by tragedy, life

            And meet psychotic assassin Klaus Reiner

            And watch as their paths are fated to cross

            And, through all this “horror” are still, not only held spellbound, but are charmed…

            THIS is a writer, and a character, you WANT to stay with for the long haul.

            By the way, Gerald Jay is a pseudonym. Who he is we do not know,

            WHAT he is, we do; one helluva story teller!”

                              --S. Berner (“First Time’s The Charm,”  Amazon, February 4, 2013)

                                                       

            ‘THE PARIS DIRECTIVE opens with two of the tightest pages of noir prose you’ll ever read. With deft precision, we are introduced to former East German agent Klaus Reiner performing adeptly in a new profession, assassin-for-hire. The passage is brilliant in detail, gripping and scary in effect. We know right away that Reiner will prove a formidable opponent for whatever hero is charged with bringing him down.”

                        --Paul McHugh (“Speed-Bumps,” Skullduggery, September 30, 2012)

                                                           

            “The German villain of THE PARIS DIRECTIVE, sleek as his Bentley Azure, a killer-for-hire with multiple identities, is pitted against Inspector Mazarelle, a lover of women, French cooking, and detection, which in this novel is a form of chivalry. Mazarelle is a deep-chair-comfortable moral center for this springhtly, stylish and sophisticated thriller. The reader is left wanting more of his company and more of Gerald Jay’s cinematic, intrigue-riddled, and tasty France.”

             --Calvin Bedient, (a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of  Books), 

                March 12, 2013

                                                           

            “The story of murder for hire is full of suspense but when one murder turns into 11 possible deaths (12 if you count the cat) you’ll be chewing your nails down to the quick….And you’ll find you need to keep reading just to see what happens (or gets killed—or almost killed—next).

            Author Gerald Jay did a great job intertwining so many seemingly unrelated people into one crime. And even those not in love with all things French will quickly find they have a soft spot for the brooding French detective Mazarelle. A fact that bodes well for future books featuring Mazarelle.  Looking back, Jay did an admirable job creating three-dimensional characters that you love, hate, or just want to meet. Even those that appear for the briefest time seem to appear with a fully developed personality, background, and motive. Bravo to Jay for creating such realistic characters.”

                                                    --Jodi Webb (“The Paris Directive,” Words by Webb,                                                                             December 31, 2012)

Violette Severin’s TOP TEN MYSTERY BOOKS OF 2012

   “Each year I prepare a list of my favorite top 10 mysteries of 

     the past year.  2012 is no different. Here are my favorites.

10. Threat Vector by Tom Clancy

  9. Kill Shot by Vince Flynn

  8. Blood Line by James Rollins

  7. THE PARIS DIRECTIVE BY GERALD JAY

  6. Fall from Grace by Richard North Patterson

  5.  Kingdom of Strangers by Zoe Ferraris

  4.  Black List by Brad Thor

  3.  The Giving Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

  2.  The Racketeer by John Grisham

  1. The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva”

                                    --The Mystery Bookshelf, December 30, 2012

PARIS DIRECTIVE Named One of 2012's Best

The Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2012
by Trina Hayes 

The best mysteries and thrillers are like delicious phyllo dough pastries. You never know what's inside them until you take a bite. Then their flavors begin to meld and spices that might seem overwhelming alone blend with others to reveal surprising sensations. The best pastries satisfy your yearnings and make you want eat every last crumb as quickly as you can.  The best mysteries and thrillers of 2012 offer tantalizing blends of evil and kindness, madness and mayhem and you'll want to find a cozy spot where no one can bother you as you devour them without interruption. 

The Best Thriller of 2012:
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is a deftly sculpted psychological thriller that resembles an upside-down cake laced with arsenic. Amy disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and her husband Nick is accused of her murder even though no body has been found. As more facts about each of the characters reveal themselves, the reader is caught up in a web of deception, madness and cruelty that only a skilled writer could pull off.  You will either adore this book or find it "too much." Regardless, Flynn's skill at weaving the intricate threads that keep the story taut must be admired. Once you start the book, be prepared to do nothing else until you finish. 

The Best Mystery of 2012:
A Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny (although her A Trick of the Light could have tied for first place).  Penny just keeps getting better and any title in the Inspector Gamache series is almost impossible to beat. A Beautiful Mystery is set in a remote monastery where a monk's murder poses a "locked" room quandary. Only the monks were there and none of them could have done it - or could they?  This order of monks may be ready to make real money with their Gregorian chant recordings. Inspector Gamache and his aide Jean-Guy Beauvoir have problems with headquarters and their personal lives that may interfere with finding the killer. As always, Penny makes each character a blend of complicated emotions as she shows how evil can be overcome. Read all of these mysteries (eight thus far with another on the way) before the debut of the Canadian public television series soon to come of the first two books. 

Other great mysteries I read in 2012 include: 

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke is a debut mystery that won high acclaim last year.  Jay Porter is an African-American attorney in Houston in this piece set in 1981.  He lives in fear because only one juror stood between him and a felony conviction and the FBI file on him is thick so he never wavers from being upright and law abiding. But when a mystery involving politics, oil and corruption literally falls into his lap when he saves a woman from drowning, his proper life begins to unravel. Will his investigations of Houston's power elite ruin his quiet life? Locke's newest novel, The Cutting Season, is one I hope to read soon as it's also garnering lots of critical praise. 

Defending Jacob by William Landay is a fast-paced courtroom drama and story of the son of a district attorney who's accused of killing a classmate.  As the father tries to save his son, he has to ask if a tendency to violence is an inheritable trait and then to explore his own past. The courtroom scenes are crisp and realistic as the author is a former district attorney.  The book will keep readers on the edge until the extremely clever ending. 

The Paris Directive by Gerald Jay introduces Inspector Paul Mazarelle, a droll, sly, unkempt, seemingly slow, cognac swigging, former Parisian star inspector who now lives in a small Dordogne village where a grisly murder is committed. The victim's daughter and the inspector track an international killer and find unexpected hurdles to overcome. This is the first in a series I predict will capture readers everywhere.  It's cinematic touches in evoking the countryside and the mischievous inspector seem perfect for the screen as well.  I can already envision some great actors portraying Mazarelle. 

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton is part mystery, part historical fiction and part classic British domestic drama. Sixteen-year-old Laurel watches a man die at a 1960s picnic and recalls the memory at her mother's 90th birthday celebration as she seeks clues to the death in her mother's early days as a young woman in WWII's London blitz era. 

 

 

 

The above is from the December 29, 2012 post of Trina Hayes' "Hungry for Good Books?" blog. 

 

 

 

ARRIVING MARCH 12, 2013....

The trade paperback edition of Gerald Jay's Dordogne thriller!!

                                                   --coming from ANCHOR BOOKS

The unpredictable Inspector Paul Mazarelle, the diabolical villain Klaus Reiner, and the beautiful Molly Reece will emerge once again this spring in the new trade paperback edition of  THE PARIS DIRECTIVE.


Don't miss it!!

Carnage in la France Profonde

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          Wednesday, September 5, 2012.  It was a gruesome crime scene. Bad as they come, according to local officials. A family of foreign tourists vacationing in nearby Annecy had been found by the side of a country road, their bloody car and three dead bodies riddled with bullets. Though in my novel, The Paris Directive, the four visitors are murdered in the Dordogne rather than the French Alps, the basic similarities—the savagery of the crimes and the victims being foreigners--had me riveted. Perhaps most striking of all was that in both instances the glorious bucolic setting had been turned into an abattoir.

            Gendarmes identified the murdered driver of the BMW as a 50-year-old engineer named Saad al-Halli, a British citizen born in Bagdad. His wife and mother-in-law slumped over in the back seat dead, and outside the car his 7-year old daughter Zainab pistol-whipped and seriously wounded. Nearby was a lone French cyclist (Sylvain Mollier, a nuclear metallurgist) who was shot dead, apparently for chancing upon the crime scene . Doubtless it was the German-made car and its British license plates that initially led authorities to believe this might have been a random act of xenophobic violence. Or perhaps, because of the remoteness of the rural setting, that it was a car jacking gone sour or some other crime of opportunity. The sort of horrific scene more commonly associated with drug-infested urban banlieues than pastoral innocence. Writing in the British Telegraph, Colin Randall made the point that the deadly fate that befell the al-Halli family, while not common in the idyllic French countryside, was by no means as rare as it once was.

            Investigators upon closer inspection of the three victims inside the car and the two bodies fallen outside on the ground soon came up with other theories. The killing ground was littered with some twenty-five spent cartridges from a single semi-automatic weapon that forensic experts would identify as a Lugar PO8, a model once standard issue to the Swiss Army. And the head wounds responsible for the deaths of al-Halli, his wife, and mother-in-law were in each instance the result of two bullets fired at close range in quick succession into the forehead—“double taps” as they’re termed by Special Operations personnel like the U.S. Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin Laden. The killers were no amateurs. According to a former chief of Scotland Yard’s  Flying Squad, this was most likely a “political assassination,” with a pre-planned target. If so, it would have been roughly similar to the killings in my novel in that the targeted hit was accompanied by ghastly collateral damage.

            The French prosecutor in charge of this case, Eric Maillaud, told the press that he would be following three lines of inquiry: 1) a family conflict over money,  2) sensitive aeronautical engineering work Saad al-Halli may have done for the British government and 3) al-Hilli’s links with his native Iraq. Despite their many questions about these murders, French investigators were determined to “crack this case.” And for foreigners such as the British reporter Colin Randall, the growing number of multiple killings in the French countryside suggested that even the spectacular beauty of la France profonde had its scary darker side.

RECENT KUDOS for THE PARIS DIRECTIVE

Vastly Entertaining

….Author Gerald Jay has taken the threads of the police procedural, the spy novel, and French charm and woven them into a vastly entertaining read. Mazarelle is a big bear of a man who smokes a special blend (Philosophe) of tobacco in his pipe, enjoys a midday cognac, and eats his favorite meals at the Café Valon. Although he believes he's not in the ranks of literary sleuths the like of Maigret or Poirot because his powers of intuition are much greater than his powers of observation, he is known as "the Swiss Army knife of detectives." One of the things he insists upon when given command of the investigation is the power of handpicking his detectives, and it's fascinating to see how he chooses them. During the selection, I felt as though there was one detective in particular that was a weak link, and it was interesting to see if my deduction was correct.

Molly Reece adds a strong yet naïve element to the cast of characters, although her intelligence and intuition seems to fade in and out as the story progresses. Klaus Reiner is one of the more interesting villains I've become acquainted with recently, a chillingly attractive blend of ego, intelligence, and psychopathy.

There are some excellent mystery series set in France-- especially those written by Cara Black, Fred Vargas, and Martin Walker. How does Gerald Jay's The Paris Directive compare? Very well indeed. I was quite happy to see that he's working on his second Inspector Mazarelle mystery. These talented writers are making France a regular stop in my crime fiction reading.

                                                                 --Cathy G. Cole, Amazon, (July 20, 2012)

Excellent Read!

This book surprised me. I'm used to the "same old thing" with crime/thrillers, and most just rehash old ground. The best, then, are ones that stand out for other reasons...excellent pacing, deep characterizations, and so forth. This isn't really an exception in terms of plot (there's nothing new under the sun), but it does stand out in every other way. I found myself engaged and interested, and I cared about the characters and what happened in the story. Really an excellent read. Highly recommended.

                                                                   --Matthew Brown, Amazon (July 14, 2012)

 

Murder-for-hire gone awry + intriguing characters

 + well-constructed plot = fun for all

The Paris Directive is to be the first in a series of thrillers revolving around protagonist Paul Mazarelle, a former Paris Inspector now living in the provincial town of Taziac, France.

Mazarelle, currently downtrodden and bored in his new environs, finds himself reinvigorated when he is thrust, headlong, into a grisly quadruple homicide that was originally to be a singular hit, on a wealthy industrialist, that, by circumstance, went horribly awry for the antagonist, Klaus Reiner.

To further complicate matters, Molly Reece, the daughter of two of the unintended victims and coincidentally a New York City ADA, shows up to collect her parents' remains and is less than satisfied with the progress, or in this case lack thereof, by Mazarelle and his squad in tracking down Reiner. Mazarelle, his cohorts, and the whole village have fingered small-time criminal turned family-man Ali Sedak, from Algeria, for the homicides. However, as Reece digs further into the circumstances surrounding Sedak and the murders she finds herself increasingly skeptical of the work of Taziac's finest, and ultimately entwined in Reiner's calculating and lethal web…. As a whole The Paris Directive is a captivating thriller filled with well-developed and relatable characters and an ever-increasingly juicy plot. I highly recommend this novel and any that will follow!

                                                                 --Pebblepuppy, Amazon (July 12, 2012)

 

Murder Chess

 ….When four brutal murders occur, Mazarelle delves into an investigation and a mystery much like a game of chess. As the story unfolds, he must match wits with suspects and leads that are revealed in bits and pieces.

The plot thickens as Molly Reece, an American and daughter of two of the murder victims, arrives on the scene. An attorney with the DA office in New York City, Molly decides to stay in France longer as she asks incisive questions and begins some of her own detective work. A striking redhead, intelligent and articulate…. Molly easily turns the heads of men, including Inspector Mazarelle, an American Embassy officer, Dwight Bennett, and a man who passes himself off as Pierre Barmeyer. Molly puts herself in danger as she makes clear she is not convinced the prime suspect is the actual murderer. Can Mazarelle protect her? Has he arrested the wrong person? What is the connection of the murders to a bigger plot?
…. As the main story resolves itself, the book leaves threads to set up potential sequels to include more of Inspector Mazarelle's investigations. I recommend this book and look forward to more adventures of the colorful French inspector from Taziac.

                                                                       --W. Easley, Amazon (July 16, 2012)

 

A Brilliant Thriller

A brilliant thriller-- extremely well written with compelling characters and an intriguing, international plot. Five Stars.

                                                                         --Diabelli, LibraryThing (June 24, 2012)

Wonderful Experience

It is a wonderful experience to read the first book in a new series, by a new author, that is so exceptionally well done and with a character so fully drawn and likeable that you know beyond any shadow of doubt that the character will go on to become a “classic” in the world of fictional detectives…. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Gerald Jay is an already well-respected novelist. The writing is too fine, the plot too well orchestrated to be someone’s “first” book. If this is Jay’s first book then a major new writer has burst into the mystery genre.

                                                               --Mysterymax, LibraryThing (July 9, 2012)

 Extremely Entertaining

Wow! A refreshing , at times humorous story about an aging detective in the Dordogne region in France. This book is well written and extremely entertaining. It has been a long time since I stayed up late to finish a book, but this one did it. I hope the second Mazarelle novel is out soon. Well done.

                                                                --Milkmanson, LibraryThing (July 9, 2012)

 Close to Mystery Nirvana

 This is pretty close to mystery nirvana: a sophisticated book set in France, populated by interesting characters, with descriptions of good food. Ahh.

Paul Mazarelle used to be a well-regarded detective in Paris, but he relocated to the Dordogne region because his wife was dying and she wanted to return home. It is 1999 and Mazarelle, now a widower, is still a flic in Taziac…. Into Mazarelle's lap falls a violent crime. Four tourists have been viciously murdered in their rental home in the countryside. Author Jay threads another story through this one, one more political and international in nature. Two former French agents have hired an assassin, Klaus Reiner. It is clear that his target is one or more of the tourists. But why? And is he really the murderer. A handyman at the rental home, Ali Sedak, has the misfortune of being a foreign national from Algeria and is being looked at for the crimes.

Although he has been away from senses-sharpening Paris for a while, Mazarelle's instincts are still attuned to what is out of place. His instincts tell him that Ali Sedak is not the killer. Echoing that thought is the American daughter of two of the victims, who has flown to Taziac to claim the bodies of her parents. She is determined to help catch whoever it really was and instead, of course, winds up on the wrong end of a cat-and-mouse game.

The mysterious Gerald Jay has written a very good debut novel. I suspect, however, that this is not his first book. He combines two serious storylines with a good sense of place, a sense of humor, and well-rounded characters…. Whoever the author is, he appreciates art and good food, essentials for writing a book set in France, n'est-ce pas?

                                                                --Barbara Tom, GoodReads (July 15, 2012)