My Review for The French Vendetta by Simon Michael
"Sally lifts the fishfingers from the grill pan and turns off the gas under the tinned spaghetti."
This quote is so English and so comforting. 🇬🇧✨ I love fishfingers and spaghetti hoops, ideally with homemade chips! 🍟 Anyway, I digress.
This is my first book by Simon Michael, and I really liked it. A lot of the book is written across two timelines, 1942 and 1970, and is set predominantly in a tiny village in France. Much of it is loosely based on true events and characters, which makes it all the more chilling. 👀
Once Charles arrives in the small French village, he discovers, in a somewhat strange way, that he is surrounded by secrets, strangers, and a lot of anger. Seemingly without reason, he is thrown into the middle of the village's version of a court case and finds himself defending the accused. ⚖️
Eventually, all the mysteries are solved, but not without upset and danger along the way. 😬 Even though this is the eleventh Charles Holborne thriller, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the others—I haven't, and I didn't even know it was the eleventh until after I'd finished! 📚
Thank you to Sapere Books and Literally PR for the gifted copy of The French Vendetta by Simon Michael and for including me on the blog tour. ❤️
France, 1969
When a rare gap opens in barrister Charles Holborne’s court diary, he and Sally seize the chance for their long-postponed honeymoon.
With baby Leia in tow, they seek peace in a friend’s farmhouse deep in the rural heart of Gascony — a picturesque land of vineyards, sleepy village squares and distant Pyrenean peaks.
But Charles soon discovers that the village’s charm hides something much darker.
Beneath the quiet seethes a poisonous web of old grudges and betrayals — a community still fighting the Second World War, where old crimes refuse to stay buried.
Drawn into a simmering vendetta between those who collaborated with the Nazis and those who resisted, Charles has no choice but to defend a client in a place with no judge, no rules, and no law.
With a firing squad waiting for the verdict, his defendant’s life is on the line…
About Simon
Simon Michael, often referred to as “the British John Grisham”, is a barrister (trial attorney) and the author of the best-selling Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers.
The books are set primarily in London in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of huge social change, and they explore loyalty and prejudice and what happens when justice collides with a corrupt Establishment. They’re historical and legal crime novels, but they’re also about memory, moral compromise, and the long shadow history casts over the present.
At their centre is barrister Charles Holborne, born Charlie Horowitz, a former East End boxer and occasional criminal who is drawn into cases shaped by gangs, organised crime, political interference and institutional corruption.
Moving between London’s courtrooms and the criminal underworld, the novels explore the tension between professional ambition and personal integrity, and the fragile line between justice and expediency. The series does not shy away from the class tensions and prejudices embedded within the legal profession of the time, including the racist, antisemitic and classist attitudes faced by those entering the Bar in the middle of the last century, echoes of which still resonate today.
Combining legal authenticity with gritty urban realism, the series uses crime as a lens to examine how power operates within institutions, who the law ultimately serves, and what it costs to pursue truth when the system itself is under pressure.
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