L’ART DU CRIME – created by Angรจle Herry-Leclerc & Pierre-Yves Mora
Season Five of the adventures of Parisian art crime investigators Florence Chassange (Elรฉonore Bernheim) and Police Captain Verlay (Nicolas Gob) has been released, and its first story, Un coeur de Pierre, is an Agatha-Christie-like puzzle mystery that hearkens back to the show’s first episode, which was not Christie-like in any way but did focus on the same character (Pierre Chassange) and the same subject (betrayal).
Pierre (played by Philippe Duclos) is the father of Florence, who is an art historian (like her dad). Florence is also an intellectual reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers’ amateur detective Harriet Vane. In fact, the entire series evokes thoughts of Sayers, though Florence’s co-protagonist Antoine Verlay is a complicated policeman with learning disabilities and anger issues and is nothing at all like Peter Wimsey. Verlay would be better described as a somewhat subdued version of MOONLIGHTING‘s David Addison.
Florence and Antoine are in love with one another, but insist upon not being aware of that. One would think that after five years, that premise would become tiresome, but the mysteries that confront them are sufficiently fascinating that their not being together continues to seem frustratingly natural.
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