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Beatrice Dunn, an orchid enthusiast and photographer, was vacationing in the Dordogne with her boyfriend when she went missing nearly 20 years ago. Her twin sister Mara never got over Bedie's disappearance, and has now moved to the Dordogne in the hope of reopening her sister's very cold case. As luck would have it, Mara finds what she believes to be Bedie's camera in a shop in a village near the spot where Bedie was last seen. When she develops the film that's still inside the camera, Mara discovers several photographs of wildflowers, especially orchids, Bedie's favorite flowers. The retired police detective who presided over the original search tells Mara about Julian Wood, an Englishman who has made his home in the Dordogne, works as a landscape contractor for ex-pats, and has literally written the book on the wild flowers of the Dordogne. When Mara contacts Julian, he's not very interested in helping with her investigation. He tells her that 19-year-old photos are an all but useless tool for locating a present-day habitat, especially one that might lead them to Bedie. That is, he's disinterested until he spots a photo of an extremely rare orchid, until now unknown to the Dordogne, at the end of the roll of film. He agrees to assist Mara in her search in the hope of discovering the orchid for himself. DEADLY SLIPPER is full of facts about the terrain and wildflowers of the Dordogne that will be of interest to those who love botany. There are also some interesting dashes of local history, particularly some tidbits about the importance of pigeon dung in medieval commerce. And the descriptions of the regional cuisine are enough to make even the most jaded reader salivate. The plot, though, reads like a cut and paste of several other novels. The real story behind Bedie's disappearance turns out to belong to a Gothic novel, not a mystery, and is way too unbelievable to be taken seriously. The last scene of the novel, by contrast, seems to have wandered in from a movie of the week. The characters of the village are pretty much what you'd expect. There are the sensual restaurateur and her husband, a slightly dotty postman, a mother and son pair of hideously gothic peasants, a very weird local lord with a lascivious past who resides with his deranged lady in a moldering castle on what's left of his baronial lands, and a retired detective who appears at intervals to pontificate about the impossibility of Mara's task. The English-speaking ex-pats, by contrast, all seem to reside in the 21st century and function reasonably well in the world as they find it. It's curious to me that someone who loves France as much as this author surely does could not come up with more believable, or at least original, French characters. I look forward to reading mysteries with foreign settings and I adore almost any book that involves botany, but DEADLY SLIPPER proved to be something of a disappointment for me. Though it has much to recommend it, be ready to overlook some big flaws in plot and characterization if you hope to enjoy this story.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, November 2005
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