Atom[ka] - Franck Thilliez

"What kind of case do you think we have in front of us?", asks a police officer in charge of a case of an unknown child with a strange tattoo on his chest. "Something long and complicated, I suspect", says Commissioner Sharko. You can take that as a given particularly as there appears to be a common theme developing in Franck Thilliez's Sharko and Henebelle cases. Le Syndrome [E] and [Gataca] both touched on unusual phenomena relating to brain and body functions, to the coding of DNA and dangerous explorations or experiments with human behaviour. In the case of [Gataca], that long and complicated route tracing a killer went back 30,000 years, which is a tough cold case to follow. There is another ‘cold’ case here in Atom[ka], their third joint case, if not going quite as far back as Cro-Magnon times.

Christophe Gamblin has been found dead in a freezer, put there while alive and frozen to death after having been tortured, leaving a scratched message in the ice that appears to say 'Agonia'. A journalist at La Grande Tribune, covering petty crime, accidents, missing persons, it seems like Gamblin has stumbled across something he shouldn't have. Other clues lead Sharko and Henebelle to the empty apartment of Gamlin's colleague Valérie Duprès, a deep investigative journalist focussing on politics, industry and the environment. Soon they manage to accumulate a number of leads that seem impossible to reconcile; an unidentified child discovered alone in Paris with a strange tattoo on his chest and the journalist’s contact details on a piece of paper, and incidents of a series of deaths by drowning of young women in the early 2000s in mountain lakes in the Rhône-Alpes region.

The prologue has already hinted that the roots of this case stretch back to 1986. Taking advantage of the chaos that took place Russia with the explosion at the nuclear reactor station in Chernobyl, a scientist Andrei Mikhaliov risks going into a office in the region and removes a top secret document from the beginning of the 20th century, as well as a small swimming animal kept in a watertight container. Pursued by the authorities, and undoubtedly heavily exposed to the deadly radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, he heads for France. As if that isn't enough to be getting on with, the traumatic events from Sharko’s past 10 years ago return to haunt him in a number of disturbingly menacing incidents directed personally - very personally - at him.

Well, you can't say that Thilliez doesn't give you plenty to keep you going right from the outset of Atom[ka], making good use of the team in two unrelated cases. Lucie is unaware of the details of Sharko's past associated with the murder of his pregnant wife by a killer known as L'Ange Rouge. As they are trying to pull their lives together as a couple and currently trying for a baby, Lucie having had a similar traumatic family experience, Sharko wants to keep Lucie away from those dark days and pursues that menace himself as a side case. It means that there are two cat-and-mouse pursuits going on; on the one hand they are chasing a killer associated with the Gamblin case, which takes Lucie to New Mexico and in the other it's Sharko who is being pursued or toyed with by a killer associated with L’Ange Rouge. 

Despite again delving deeply into scientific exploration on human behaviour - and all the other thriller elements going on - Atom[ka] is however fairly methodical, with fewer of the unexpected turns of Le Syndrome [E] or [Gataca]. Other than it being a convention, I'm not sure there was any need to open with the prologue in Chernobyl, as it kind of gives the game away about the direction the story is headed. Obviously there is a lot more to it, but it's less of a surprise than it could be. By the time Sharko and Henebelle take up that trail to its source I had started to lose interest, as it became mostly just a matter of wrapping things up. As if aware of that, the threats to Sharko remain ever present, but even there the cat-and-mouse chase also seems rather conventional, the mystery person leaving obscure clues, riddles and chess moves as a lure. Atom[ka] starts well, has the usual original Thilliez intrigue and strong characters in Lucie and Sharko, but this one feels a little too long to sustain suspense through to the end.

Reading notes: I read the French paperback edition of Atom[ka] by Franck Thilliez published by Pocket, as the author's work does not appear to be translated into English.