Bruno Chief of Police Series (Martin Walker) Retail epub

Who is Bruno Courreges?
Bruno cooks, he hunts, he builds his own house and grows his own food. He organizes the parades and festivities and fireworks displays and keeps order in his fictional home town of St Denis. A pillar of the local tennis and rugby clubs, he teaches sports to the local schoolchildren.

Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off Brussels. The country folk of the Perigord have been making their foie gras and their cheeses and sausages for centuries before the EU was ever heard of, and see no reason to bow to its rules and regulations now.

Bruno also catches criminals.

But Bruno applies his own sense of justice in doing so, which sometimes put him at odds with the local Gendarmes, with the professional detectives of the Police Nationale, and with the politicians in distant Paris.

And much to the frustration of those matrons of St Denis with unmarried daughters, for whom he is the town’s most eligible and charming bachelor, Bruno remains stubbornly and contentedly single. He is, however, a great romantic with a profound if somewhat wary appreciation of the fair sex. He fell deeply and tragically in love in once, in his time in the French Army where he served and was wounded in the peacekeeping force sent to Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo. The incident is recounted in the first novel, ‘Bruno Chief of Police.’

Bruno never knew his father, and his unmarried mother left him as a baby in a basket in a church. Christened Benoit, the blessed, by the priest who found him and sent him to a church orphanage, he decided to call himself Bruno as soon as he was old enough to insist upon it. When his mother died and left a note explaining where she had left her baby, he was taken from the orphanage by cousins in humble circumstances and raised with their large family in the town of Bergerac. At the age of 15, he left to join the Army’s Youth Battalion. On his 18th birthday, he signed up for 12 years with the combat engineers, a period which ended while he was convalescing from his wounds.

Bruno reports to the long-time Mayor of St Denis, Gerard Mangin, a wily old politician who once worked as a political secretary to the future President of France Jacques Chirac. The Mayor’s political connections, his time at the European Commission as Chirac’s eyes and ears in Brussels and his brief stint as a member of the French Senate, always proved useful. Above all, they have ensured a steady supply of grants and funds from Brussels and Paris that ensure St Denis prospers when so many small towns of rural France have withered.