Les voies majeures - Christian Ego

Christian Ego's first novel, Commissioner Évelyne Delmas novel Le premier appelé had a historical characters connected with events in the Ukraine during the war in 1941. The author seems to follow a similar path in his second Commissioner Delmas thriller, Les voies majeures. Here however, the path to follow isn't initially clear and the principal problem the Versailles police force face is in eliminating those issues before they can hope to start unravelling an age old mystery.

The case is set in motion by the murder of Jérôme Peyrat, shot dead at his Inn on the outskirts of Paris, the motive far from clear. It seems that he belonged to a far-right group, one the reader will know about from the opening chapter detailing them going about defiling mosques. Although Peyrat has a cache of weapons, he appears small time, more involved in printing pamphlets. The killer could just as easily be a disgruntled employee or the jealous husband of the chief waitress that Peyrat was seeing, but something tells Commissioner Évelyne Delmas that there is more to it.

The plot however takes a while to get going. There scarcely seems enough evidence here or indication of anything serious enough to allow Delmas and her team so much freedom and resources to follow unpromising leads that nonetheless result in the solving a number of unrelated or tangential cases. There is a neat twist, albeit somewhat probable, when the alibi of the suspected jealous husband (even through they don't believe he has anything to do with it) shows some peculiarities that does in fact lead them to the anti-Islamic far right group perpetrators of the defilement of mosques.

Having got that red herring out of the way - which would have been evident to the reader already - about halfway through the author throws in a mystery about an ancient codex, a lost testament. Even then the police are still running around trying to find the sister of the dead man Peyrat, since the property has been rapidly sold for an amount and she and her family absconded leaving huge debts from failed enterprises behind them. The Commissioner is very thorough about following up leads for sure, and seems to have plenty of freedom to do so, but she always seems to be chasing tangential crimes rather than furthering the murder investigation.

Once the motive around the chaplaincies comes in however things start moving, but it all feels a little too nearly delivered into their laps. It's a very mechanical procedural for the most part, with no real challenges to how they travel around into other jurisdictions and across departments. Little in the way too of any real character development. Apart from noting that Delmas is going through a divorce and receives some texts from her daughter, there is little effort made to breathe any personality or character into any of the police or indeed secondary players they come into contact with.