In this series, we invite our Crime Cymru authors to showcase an excerpt from one of their books. This week, Sally Spedding gives us a taste of the thrilling opening to the fourth book in her Delphine Rougier series, set in France’s Ariège department.

‘La min i sém. Lo zyé i ramas.’

(‘The hand sows the seed, the eye reaps the corn.’)

Créole saying.

It’s summer, and holidays are in full swing. Yet in France’s spectacular and historic Ariège department, terror still lurks amongst its beauty. Where a shocking secret concerning young French citizens from Réunion, its distant colony – ostensibly sent several decades ago to help re-populate that and other parts of France – waits to be uncovered.

Little did those innocent victims realise their intended fate. Too many years later, on Monday 9^th August 2010, after one of them, Maurice Doucet, now aged forty-one, employed by a…