Parasite - Sylvain Forge

If there's one thing that can be said about Sylvian Forge's Parasite, it's that it manages to bring together a surprising variety of ideas together that you might not expect to see in a police crime thriller, but in a way that is precisely the kind of counter-intuitive connections and leaps that sometimes need to be made to resolve complex crime networks. In Parasite those connections are made by Valmont, an experimental artificial intelligence engine capable of processing vast amounts of information to present unexpected deductions and leads. 

Valmont has been developed with the help of IT software engineer, Ethan Milo who has been left almost paralysed with a fragment of shrapnel close to his spine after a terrorist attack. The Ministry of Defence want to test the system and have teamed Ethan up with Captain Marie Lesaux, a police officer in family and child protection unit in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. She's been asked to test Valmont from the department's large cold case sin bin cupboard. One case of particular interest is the death of a young Malawi girl who fell to her death from Marie's own HLM complex. She suspects darker motives including a traditional 'Hyena' practice to "purify" young girls when they begin to menstruate.

Suspiciously, anyone who has previously done any investigation into this case has apparently committed suicide and a sinister sign with voodoo connections has started to turn up in sites connected with the case. Marie and Ethan begin to suspect a cover-up and a conspiracy being enacted in high places, and before you know it, the plot does go soon into the direction of wild pulp conspiracies. Mysterious black cars follow them around, the case points to paedophile rings, mixed up with kamikaze dogs and a plant that sets off a parasitic reaction that causes suicidal behaviour in the brain. Even some of the background details are quite bizarre, and seem to have little connection, such as Marie's father having disappeared in Africa apparently eaten by a lion.

Despite some of the more far-fetched sounding elements of Parasite, the Valmont experiment is based on the real-life VALCRI system currently being developed and tested in UK and Belgium. Indeed, despite the fears of the rest of the police department that they are about to be replaced by a robot, Valmont doesn't seem to be much more than a huge data warehouse, with access to confidential reports otherwise lost or covered up. It does however have a movie like ability to create 3D ultra realistic recreations of crime scenes without Google Maps. Even the idea of plant toxoplasmosis has a basis in reality. Despite a lot of improbable plotting, it's interesting to see those connections drawn up, and the ending is well handled.