Deadly Camargue is Cay Rademacher’s second Provence Mystery featuring the recently disgraced and transferred—from Paris to the Provence region in southeastern France—Capitaine Roger Blanc. Blanc’s boring summer routine is interrupted by the death of a cyclist at the horns of a Camargue black fighting bull. It’s an investigation beneath Blanc’s abilities as a detective, but anything is better than sitting at the police station.

When Blanc arrives at the incident, he finds a macabre scene: the bull shot dead by another officer and the cyclist still sprawled on the tarmac. The victim is identified as the celebrity journalist Albert Cohen, who was spending a summer in the Camargue at his friend and editor’s home recovering from a heart attack. An open and closed case, but Blanc has a niggling suspicion Cohen’s death is more than an accident.

Deadly Camargue is an inviting traditional mystery that opens at a painfully slow gait, but ultimately plays out with an intelligent plot, well-developed characters, and genuinely funny humor. The oddball murder-by-bull is only the beginning of an intriguing case that reaches across time to a 1980s French communist terror cell, an unsolved theft of a Van Gogh painting, and a new hypothesis—to this reader anyway—of how Van Gogh lost his ear.

Roger Blanc has an understated and self-effacing style that is pleasingly perfect for the story. The dialogue and several situations (Blanc drives an ancient Citroen 2CV, his house is without a roof for most of the story) add humor and depth. And once the story starts to roll, there is enough action and surprise in Deadly Camargue for an enjoyable diversion.