Book review: Children of War, by Martin Walker

Children of War is the seventh novel in Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police, mystery series, set in the Perigord region of France. Walker owns a house there and has based his hero on Pierrot, the village policeman of his small town. Walker describes Pierrot as “a hunter, a wonderful cook and a very decent man with an idiosyncratic method of law enforcement”.  Walker’s readers will recognise  Bruno immediately.

Walker’s Chief of Police, Bruno Courreges, in his fictional village of St Denis, is an ex-soldier, wounded at Sarajevo while serving with the UN peacekeeping forces. His military experience means he often works for the Brigadier, “ the shadowy official from the Interior Ministry” when the need arises.

Bruno contacts the Brigadier when Rafiq, a French agent, who was ”working undercover on jihadists”, is found tortured to death in the woods near St Denis. French Intelligence suspect radical Islamists are operating out of a mosque in Toulouse, even though the chief Imam is on the government’s advisory board on Islamic assimilation.

The same day, Bruno receives an email from “an old mate” currently serving in Afghanistan. A young Muslim man called Sami has walked into a French army base asking to be sent home to St Denis. Sami “seems simple-minded, scars on his back from whippings ... badly traumatized”. Diagnosed as autistic as a child, Sami had been sent to a special school in the Toulouse mosque, from which he had gone missing four years earlier.

Sami, however, proves to be a wanted jihadist, a bomb expert known as “the Engineer”, although both Bruno and the Brigadier suspect al-Qaeda “used this poor pathetic boy, even whipped him to build bombs”. Sami and his family are taken into protective custody, as rogue elements from the Toulouse mosque try to eliminate them.

Walker mitigates the brutal horror of his central narrative with a heartwarming episode from World War II, when Protestant farmers in remote France cared for and saved Jewish children from the Nazi death camps. The contrast between the past and the present highlights Walker’s central message about the fate of children in war and that St Denis “saves Jews, abandons Muslims”.

Walker’s previous novels have been cleverly crafted police procedurals but Children of War is more a thriller, with Bruno morphing into a James Bond action hero by the end. However, all the other essential ingredients of a satisfying Bruno mystery are still there: Bruno’s love for his town and the surrounding countryside, and the cooking, using the produce of the region, including truffles, is as mouthwatering as ever.