Paul Gallico's The Zoo Gang consists of four longish stories, too short to be novels, too long to be short stories, but fascinating no matter what you call them. The central character of each story is Colonel Pierre Roqubrun, an antique dealer on France's Cote d'Azur, playground of the rich and famous as well as the greedy and unscrupulous, and four of his former colleagues in the French Resistance of WWII. During the war the gang was the scourge of the German occupatiers of the Riviera; now they are all respected citizens with their memories of the perilous days at war.
In The Picture Thieves, a gang has stolen twelve famous Renoir paintings from a museum in Cannes. Captain Scoubide, the local police detective, suspects that the Zoo Gang may be involved in this burglary as well as two other recent art thefts in the area. His questioning leads the Colonel to wonder whether his former colleagues, now all respectable merchants and tradesmen, might indeed be involved, and if they are, how he can extricate them.
In How To Stick Up A Million Dollar Riviera Gala, a whisper of a planned attack on a glittering society charity gala leads Colonel Roqubrun to ask the Zoo Gang to tell him how they would pull off such a heist; when they come up with a plan, he has the uneasy feeling that they might actually be planning to do it.
In Snow Over The Cote d'Azur, the death of the Colonel's favorite niece from a heroin overdose leads him to declare war on the drug traffickers of the Riviera, using the special talents of his four WWII Resistance colleagues, although he has to apologize to them for blowing up a chocolate factory on his own that was being used to process drugs.
Le Double Snatch finds the Colonel narrating the story of a double kidnapping as the final chapter unfolds before his audience.
These are just great stories. Grade: A.
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