To The Last Page

There is inevitably quite a bit of interest in retrospectively going further back into the career of an established crime thriller figure like Commissioner Franck Sharko. Franck Thilliez takes us back then to 1991 to the first murder case undertaken by Sharko as a inspector recently appointed to a post in Paris. Anyone familiar with Sharko knows what will happened a short time afterwards in the first written Sharko novel Train d'enfer pour Ange rouge  and knows how deeply he has been marked by his experiences personally and professionally, so it comes as little surprise that his first case is also a very unusual and disturbing one that also challenges him on a personal level. There are a couple of cases that land on the desk of the 30 year old inspector in December 1991. Sharko, who has been in the service for seven years in provinces and in Lille, has only recently moved to Paris and is sent to look through the archives of a case that has remained open but unresolved for several y...

Fred Vargas has her own unique approach to the crime thriller, and in her Commissioner Adamsberg series at least (although it's there also to an extent in her Three Evangelists series) - there are two themes that both feature to one extent or another; one related to history and the other to the idea (if not necessarily reality) of something supernatural. Having finally arrived almost a decade after publication at Temp glaciaires , those two themes here seem to me so outlandish that they are almost wilfully self-referential to the extent of self-parody. Or perhaps the author sees it as something of a self-imposed challenge. It's almost as if she has come up with the two most outlandish stories she can imagine and attempts to connect them. One featuring an evil spirit that haunts a small Icelandic island and one where the descendants of French revolutionaries replay in costume the pronouncements, betrayals and executions of their rivals. Only Vargas could get away with it, and sh...

Picking up the pace a little - the first Prefect Dreyfus novel The Prefect was published in 2008 and later repackaged as Aurora Rising in preparation for the continuation of the series in 2018 with the second book Elysium Fire . Machine Vendetta looks to be the third and final part of the series, and if it ends here, it wraps up the trilogy rather neatly, following through on some of the underlying issues and wider problems being dealt with by the law-enforcement service for the Glitter Band, the Panoply. The Panoply are not so much a law-enforcement authority however as a kind of federal agency that ensures that the democratic process of polling cores on each of the thousands of habitats in the Glitter Band around Yellowstone are not tampered with in any way. Outside of that, the habitats have their own autonomy and Panoply only intervene when there is a serious matter that violates the Common Articles and could impact on other habitats. Not everyone accepts their authority but mos...