Surface - Olivier Norek

Although it opens in a scene and setting familiar to his Code 93 series (and there is a brief cameo of one of Captain Coste's SDPJ 93 team), Surface is a very different style and pace from Olivier Norek, out of the crime and drug murders of the high rise suburbs of Paris and out in the country. It starts off in familiar territory however, with drug squad officer Noémie Chastain shot in the face attempting the arrest of a drug dealer in just such a location. She is left with life-changing injuries, suffering nightmares and PTSD in the aftermath. Even after a long recovery period and psychological treatment, she finds that she is still not ready to return to duties in the city and is offered a temporary transfer to a station in a small village in the south of France, Decazeville in the Aveyron region.

It's not a straightforward transfer, Noémi is expected to write a report on the possible closure of the station due to budget cutbacks and a notable lack of any serious crime in the region. She expects it to be routine but inevitably something big surfaces. A body of a child wrapped in plastic floats to the surface of a lake, a lake that was created for a dam which submerged the old village of Avalone 25 years ago. The body is suspected to be one of three children who disappeared at that time. Both events have left scars on the inhabitants of the relocated village, the rumours still persisting that link it to the disappearance of a seasonal worker, Fortin, at the same time.

After the intense police procedural and violent crime of his SDPJ93 'Banlieues Trilogy' this inevitably seems a little routine for Olivier Norek. The provincial small village characters all seem very stereotypical, the naive police officers knocked into shape by a more experienced city police officer, with an ambitious but openly racist mayor in charge who wants to turn around the fortunes of the region, who now finds his plans disrupted by the revelation from the lake. Of course Noémie is damaged and an outsider, so that makes it more interesting but even so, there are still a lot of obvious psychological metaphors in the situation relating to the police officer on her difficult road to recovery, rescuing a disfigured dog beaten by his master, and - as the title indicates on a number of levels - dark secrets floating up from the surface.

Norek overcomes most of these issues of course though his usual clever plotting and pacing of revelations. Despite suspicions of writing cliched characters, Norek has nonetheless done his research and in fact can even call the region his home, so he knows what he is writing about. There's little that is new here, either in the personal complications of Noémie's road to recovery and love life or in the small village hiding dark secrets in its past, but Norek keeps it moving along well, providing plenty of thrills and revelations.