The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier

Publication date: 01 Aug 2013. Mulholland Books. Translated by Alison Anderson.

Bernard Minier grew up at the foot of the Pyrenees. He has received several awards for his short stories. The Frozen Dead, originally titled Glacé (2011), is his first crime novel.

The blurb reads: The first victim is a horse: its headless body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a secure asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. Commandant Servaz, a Toulouse city cop, can’t believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum is found on the corpse… and a few days later the first murder takes place. In this snowbound valley, deep in the Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. It will take all of Servaz’s skill to solve it.

You can read my previous post Glacé – Frozen.

His second novel El círculo, originally titled Le Cercle (2012), has just been released in Spain. (Roca editorial).

Just wonder if we won’t speak soon of a Pyrenees Noir. After all Adamsberg was born there.

Glacé – Frozen

Bajo el hielo (Roca, 2011), original title Glacé, translated from the French by Dolors Gallart is the debut novel of Bernard Minier and has just been published by Roca editorial. It was a great success since its release in February 2011, and was awarded with the Prize to the best novel at Cognac Crime Fiction (Polar) Festival.

Synopsis: December 2008. The setting, a deep valley in the Pyrenees. On their way to work, the employees of an hydroelectric plant have discovered the beheaded body of a horse hanging in the frozen side of the mountains.
The investigation of this gruesome discovery is assigned to Captain Servaz, an hypochondriac in his forties who always behaves instinctively. This is the strangest case in his career. What reason would anyone have to kill a horse, two thousand meters above sea level? Everything indicates that this is only the starting point of a long nightmare. That same day, a young psychiatrist starts working in the local psychiatric hospital. (My free translation).