Code 93 - Olivier Norek

Code 93, the first book in Olivier Norek's 'Banlieues Trilogy', a policier series dealing with the modern day realities of violent drug crime in the suburbs of Paris, gets off to an intriguing start with two separate, but inevitably connected, strange and inexplicable deaths. It's 2011, and although Camille has been reported missing for a long time, when her family are invited to morgue to identify the body of a dead young woman who has clearly suffered drugs and sexual abuse, they refuse to recognise that the woman is Camille.

Soon after, the body of a large man is found by security guard in an abandoned warehouse near the canal with three bullet wounds and no pulse. When the autopsy is carried out however, it is discovered that he hasn't actually been shot at all, it's just he is wearing the shirt of a man who has been shot three times. He may not have been shot, but he has been castrated while alive. And speaking of alive it turns out that the 'corpse' isn't dead either. Having seemingly discovered a 'zombie', when they subsequently find the man who was actually shot three times burned alive seemingly in a case of spontaneous combustion, that's all it takes for Commander Victor Coste of the Service départmental de police judiciare de Seine-Saint-Denis (SDPJ 93) and his autopsy medic to be labelled the Mulder and Scully of the French police.

Written with a terrific sense of irony and black humour, Code 93 proposes an intriguing case that serves to introduce the reader to the SDPJ 93 team as well as the kind of difficult and ugly work they are involved in. We get backgrounds to Sam and Ronan, the new recruit Johanna De Ritter and some insight into the dark event that has marked Coste n his past. Even the doctor Léa Marquant and Coste's attraction to her is established well. It's Coste's close associate Mathias Aubin, recently transferred out to Annecy however whose indiscretions in the deletion of a number of unexplained deaths of people on the streets that threaten to come back to haunt the SDPJ 93.

There's a little bit of theatricality to the killings and the idea of an elite club specialising in 'exotic tastes' is a common one, but the connections between the killings and the power of the wealthy and those in authority to cover up to the missing homeless and drug addicts that is uncovered makes for an interesting opening book. More than the plot, it's the characterisation and the humour and irony in Norek's writing that stand out here.