When the world's most powerful oil minister is found shot dead in the middle of a French vineyard, a London oil trader is first on the scene, swiftly followed by the charming daughter of a viticulteur from Cognac's finest growing region and a police officer whose task, at first urgent and career-defining, comes to seem "as as futile as trying to investigate the killing of ants squashed beneath his heel." A year in Paradise is doubly genre-busting,...