A young woman is found murdered ...and the clues to her death point to her spurned lover, Paul Cezanne.
In this richly atmospheric novel, a mysterious young woman named Solange Vernet arrives in Aix-en-Provence with her lover, a Darwinian scholar named Charles Westbury, and a year later is found strangled in a quarry outside the city. The young and inexperienced magistrate, Bernard Martin, finds his investigation caught in the crossfires of a raging cultural debate. Many of the more conservative residents of Aix, including Martin's own police investigator, believe that Solange reaped what she sowed for entertaining such radical scientific theories.
Initially assuming that Solange's murder was a simple "crime de passion" by either a spurned Cezanne or a betrayed Westbury, Bernard soon finds himself on a mission to unravel the secrets of Solange and Cezanne's hidden past--the key to which may be a series of his paintings which depict the strangulation and violation of a woman with golden-red hair.
Exploring questions of science and religion--and the role of women in these realms--that persist even today, "Cezanne's Quarry" is an impressive debut mystery about life, death, love, and art.