To The Last Page

The team of Alexandre Galien's police series are responsible for crime in the district to the eastern edge of the city, and as a former police officer, a gardien de la paix , working in this part of the city, the author clearly knows the district, the workings of the police service and the kind of crimes that take place there. I don't doubt the authenticity of his credentials, but partly due to the atypical nature of the crime here and the author's writing style, I wasn't convinced by his second novel featuring Commissioner Philippe Valmy, Le souffle de la nuit . At the start of this thriller, Valmy has now retired from the 36 after the affair recounted presumably in Les cicatrices de la nuit , which was awarded the 2020 Prix du Quai des Orfèvre. I haven't read the first book, so it's not immediately clear why Valmy has retired early from his career, or what has happened to leave him in a fairly troubled state. We do find out why later, and that events have come

Published in 1992, his seventh novel, Corazón tan blanco is the novel that launched Javier Marías onto the international stage as a writer with a distinct and unique voice. It has also proved to be one of his more popular and enduring books, one that touches on themes, characters and subjects that would be developed further in his later work, to such an extent that his body of work feels like a consistent exploration and refinement of preoccupying ideas, worked though in a number of ways. It's almost impossible to review such a book without relating the 'plot' (such as it is), since everything and nothing may be relevant to what it is about. This novel itself weaves through several situations that can be seen to mirror or parallel each other, or perhaps inform and distort how one views the other, or perhaps between them they amount to something else. A lot of perhapses but that's the nature of how Marías works. What is definitely significant and certainly has repercuss