Day eight in my series showcasing my top reads of 2018, following the innovative idea of #bookvent from Jen Lucas of Jen Med’s Book Reviews.
Day 8 is a book I started and soon began to wish it would never end. Part crime novel, part love song to the sea, it is so beautifully, lyrically, written that you want to stay forever luxuriating in the language until the sea comes to claim you as its own. All the more kudos then, not just to the author, but also the translator, because this is an awesome writing job.
Have you worked out my choice behind Door number 8, yet?
As Montrealer Catherine Day sets foot in a remote fishing village and starts asking around about her birth mother, the body of a woman dredges up in a fisherman’s nets.
Not just any woman, though: Marie Garant, an elusive, nomadic sailor and unbridled beauty who once tied many a man’s heart in knots.
Detective Sergeant Joaquin Morales, newly drafted to the area from the suburbs of Montreal, barely has time to unpack his suitcase before he’s thrown into the deep end of the investigation.
On Quebec’s outlying Gaspé Peninsula, the truth can be slippery, especially down on the fishermen’s wharves. Interviews drift into idle chit-chat, evidence floats off with the tide and the truth lingers in murky waters.
It’s enough to make DS Morales reach straight for a large whisky… Both a dark and consuming crime thriller and a lyrical, poetic ode to the sea, We Were the Salt of the Sea is a stunning, page-turning novel, from one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction.
This fine book made it into my must read list both because this is very fine writing from Roxanne Bouchard, but also it also has humour, mystery and not a little darkness.
Set in the Gaspé peninsula, which is home to a small fishing community whose lives are disrupted from time to time by the arrival of tourists flitting through on their way to something more tacky. It is here that Catherine Day arrives from Montreal in search of her birth mother, Marie Garant, and to gain some knowledge about her birth father.
A story of love and longing, of murder and madness; it is full of phrases that live in the memory and speak to the human condition. What could be more beautiful than that? Another fine read from Orenda Books
You can read my review here.
Buy the book : Orenda Books Amazon Waterstones
Live and Deadly 
This book is a gem!
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