The Night Gate

"Peter May writes about a forensic investigator, Enzo Macleod, who sometimes in the series is in Scotland, but in this one has retired to southern France. He’s a workaholic, so he doesn’t enjoy being retired, and gets involved with an old mystery. It goes back to World War II, when this part of France was occupied by the Nazis, so you get elements of the French Resistance as well as stolen art treasures and all kinds of things going on within this mystery. I have to give Peter Forbes, the narrator, just a tremendous amount of credit here. First of all, you’ve got Scottish accents mixed with French and German and all the characters in this. I was really in awe of his ability to not only convincingly put these accents together but keep them all straight. Peter Forbes has recorded many of Peter May’s mysteries, and I would imagine that they’re probably easier when they’re set in Scotland because French with a Scottish accent is quite a feat. So I don’t know what UK listeners will think of it but, to an American, it comes off pretty well. He does. As I said, he’s done a number of Peter May’s titles, which are often a little dark and a little tense. Keeping the listener on edge is part of the plan. Peter Forbes does that extremely well, even though you’re in southern France, so there’s food and all kinds of other diversions, which lighten this episode in the series."

"The Night Gate takes the reader to the Dordogne region of France , both during World War II and in the present, during Covid. Part of the action also takes place in Berlin and the Outer Hebrides, where a young French girl trains to be dropped behind enemy lines in France during the war. The book is the finale of a series by Peter May featuring a detective called Enzo MacLeod. I haven’t read any of the others, but The Night Gate features such a large cast of characters, and events taking place on such a broad canvas, that lots of scenes from the book stick with me. There’s Charles de Gaulle , stolen art, both Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring trying to get their hands on the Mona Lisa. The book is fiction, but it’s based on fact, and how Louvre paintings were kept safe from the Nazis. Some of the minor characters in the book, like French art historian Rose Valland, were real people. Peter May lives in the Dordogne, and many of the paintings were hidden in nearby Château de Montal; some had even spent time in his garage."