THE black novel about purification: traitors and heroes mingled in the ashes of the Liberation.
September 10, 1944. The police superintendent Georges Duroy is at the wheel of his Peugeot 402 Légère, driving towards Saint-Julien-en-Vercors, in the Drôme.
A former resistance fighter, his first mission was to investigate a crime committed in the Vercors, the land of martyrs still bloody from Operation Aktion Bettina: in mid-July, the Wehrmacht mobilized 10,000 men and killed 639 combatants and 210 civilians.
This September 10, a corpse was added to the long list of dead: a young girl named Marie was found raped and her throat slit in the forest. A barbaric murder that shook the entire plateau. Marie is the youngest daughter of a family of resistance fighters.
Who killed Marie? The militiamen who take revenge on the Valette family? Why doesn’t anyone want to talk? Neither Valette’s father, a farmer, nor their mother, nor their son-in-law Louis... nor the silent ones on the set. No one. Really nobody?
While the Vercors mourns the fifteen people shot in La Chapelle-en-Vercors, the sacrificed in the Grotte de la Luire and all its dead, and while the resistance fighters hunt traitors, militiamen, black market poachers, servile merchants, civil servants too loyal to Pétain..., Duroy will have to untangle the true from the false, penetrate the silence. In this abyss of questions, he will team up with a young American photographer, as cheerful and confident as Duroy is taciturn and rational. And together, once the matter is resolved, they will have to make a decision: what to do with the heroes who have committed the irreparable?
