La chambre des morts - Franck Thilliez

There is of course no such thing as a perfect crime, but Vigo and his friend Sylvain think they have managed it. Or perhaps they don't really think of what they have done as a crime but an unfortunate accident that works in their favour. It certainly wasn't premeditated to kill anyone while driving a car in an area of deserted warehouses in Dunkirk at 100kmh in the dark with no lights on, but when they hit a man and find that he has a suitcase containing €2 million euro, well, disposing of the body and holding onto the money certainly can't be treated as anything less than criminal. But what is no one was there, no one sees it and no one finds the body and they keep the 2 million, does that make it a perfect crime?

What Vigo and Sylvain don't really think to ask themselves - until it is too late of course - is what a man was doing in that remote deserted place with such a huge sum of money, and did no-one really witness what happened? It sounds suspiciously like a ransom drop-off and indeed, when police brigadier Lucie Henebelle and her team are called on to investigate on Christmas Eve, it doesn't take long to find the forensic evidence that pretty much explains exactly what happened. So much for the perfect crime, and not so smart to leave their graffiti tag nearby either. Maybe keep low for a while and everything will blow over, if only they can trust each other and curb that impulse to spend all that money….

While Vigo and Sylvain might have forgotten, the reader and the police will certainly not have missed the other aspect to all this, the intended recipient of the ransom money and the death of a young child that is the result of the failure of the drop-off. That's a whole other level of horrific crime that is by no means concluded. The murdered child had been blind, had undoubtedly been treated horrendously, her body left posed like a doll. An autopsy reveals some other strange elements, the smell of leather permeating her body and the hair of a wolf found in her oesophagus. This is carefully arranged scene is clearly not the action of a one-off panicked abductor. La Bête, the Beast, is likely to strike again, if he hasn't already done so before.

It also, it has to be said, feels a little overly stage-managed by Franck Thilliez. The wolf hair leads to the discovery of the abduction of animals from a zoo, which of course has relevance down the line, but feels like an unnecessary twist or distraction. It certainly adds an edge that makes this thriller quite different from a standard crime thriller, but is it necessary? Is the kidnap with the twist that the ransom is taken by not-so-innocent bystanders not enough to make La chambre des morts distinctive and tense enough in its own right? Possibly, particularly as there is an interesting family and historical reason for self-justification on the part of Vigo with the money, but it's there and it does open up other avenues. The lines of police investigation and cooperation are particularly well-handled, following credible lines in a professional manner.

The real strength of La chambre des morts is maybe in the characterisation and motivations, at least on the police side - not so much I feel on the killer side. Lucie Henebelle, a young mother, has an interest in extremes of criminal psychology and she certainly has something unusual to look into here. The efforts of the two young men with a couple of million, and how they deal with this potentially life-changing event (although in practice, perhaps not as they might have wished), where avarice and self-entitlement is mixed with guilt, is also well done. 

Unfortunately the staging of the conclusion, revelations and minor twists are, if not quite Grand Guignol, nonetheless somewhat unconvincingly handled. Descending into those dark dungeons of horror, I rapidly lost interest as La chambre des morts headed towards a rather conventional denouement of dramatic confrontations. In his first Lucie Henebelle thriller however Thilliez at least sets the ground that can be built upon and, from my limited reading of this series so far, it's certainly more fully realised by the time she teams up with Sharko in Syndrome [E].

Reading notes:  La chambre des morts by Franck Thilliez was originally published by Le Passage in France in 2005, I read a 2009 French Pocket paperback edition picked up second-hand from the invaluable Gibert Joseph store on the Boulevard St Michel in Paris.