À la vue de tous - Alex Sol
À la vue de tous certainly has you gripped from the intriguing opening incident. Laura has gone to the police with a report that her pregnant sister Marie has simply vanished between two stations on the Paris metro. It might not sound worrying, but it's surprising how many people wander off everyday and sometimes turn up again soon later, so the police understandably don't take the matter too seriously at first. Nonetheless there is something strange about the circumstances here. Marie is pregnant, in her 8th month, and Laura has only just returned on a surprise visit from Canada to see her sister after an absence of many years. It was while they were on their way home that a breakdown occurred on metro line between stations and when the lights came back on Marie had disappeared, leaving a distraught Laura and the shopping bags.
So, no not the kind of thing that happens everyday, but it has happened before and when he is informed of the disappearance Commandant Lucas Lievens is immediately suspicious. Unfortunately, he has moved to a different station and has been removed from duties at the present time without ever resolving the previous case and that troubles him. Fortunately Lievens maintains a professional connection with Élise Duromain, as he was formerly her old boss, and it's she who has been placed in charge of the case. Relations between them however are a little awkward at the moment, but they have more in common than they might like to admit. This case opens up old wounds, or old light scratches maybe, that make working together a problem. It's certainly a problem as far as Duromain's current Commandant is concerned.
There is a good balance maintained here between the personal issues, Laura and Lievens unofficial investigation and Duromain's official police investigation. Sol digs deep into the backgrounds of each hinting at numerous suspicious circumstances - the missing woman's husband is an obvious place to start - that might have led to the abduction without any of them being likely or obvious. There is also the death of Marie and Laura's parents when just 18 and 13 in a car accident, which has very evidently shaped their lives as adults, Laura even losing a leg in the accident and having subsequent problems with drugs and alcohol. She also doesn't see eye to eye with Marie's husband, Robert, who reacts angrily to the connection he sees between Laura's return on the day his wife is abducted.
That's only the initial setup, but you are guaranteed a high level of suspense and thrills in the remaining 650-odd pages of À la vue de tous. It's a compulsive binge read with continuing developments and progressions that would make a thrilling TV mini series of it own. And for the most part, what also kept me reading personally was that there were few missteps, few occasions when you had to suspend disbelief - or at least not that first half of the book. Inevitably, when you are dealing with a thriller at this pace, providing a series of revelations and surprises to keep the reader engaged and guessing, there comes a point where you start to realise it's going to be hard to keep up that momentum without it all getting a little bit hard to believe. Some of Laura's actions in taking on her own investigation are the first sign that it looks like heading off the rails, but those are soon laid aside when there is a subsequent barrage of fast-moving developments and horrors to follow.
If the strong characterisation goes some way to make behaviours t least semi-plausible, the more vital area where it needs to keep you engaged with the dramatic plot developments is to make the motivation and mechanics of the abduction intriguing and ultimately convincing. It's a kind of locked room mystery of sorts - a locked underground train carriage mystery - so that's always going to be a fascinating hook, but more than just looking for the person who abducted Marie, there remains the puzzling question of why. I can't say the final revelations are any more convincing, and there are further minor false notes where characters are unable to see the obvious, but it was all good enough to keep this reader at least racing through the escalating events.
The characterisation of the lead figures helps, as I said, but I like also that there are a good range of secondary characters who all have little roles to play. Some are unusual, but it all helps fill out social context and attitudes to crime, and these witnesses, neighbours and bystanders all have a small part to play outside of letting the main characters take on everything. But they still take on a lot, perhaps too much ultimately. The concluding twists and revelations undoubtedly make great reading for some, and the author makes as strong as case as she can for actions taken for "pourquoi en venir à de telles extrémités?", but they were just too improbable for me. That won't stop me reading more books in this series though.
Reading notes: À la vue de tous by Alex Sol appears to be self-published, with the author even taking the credit for the cover. There are paperback editions available, but I picked up a Kindle edition that collects the first three books in the series after reading a sample and finding myself immediately hooked. I found the author's writing very easy to read in French at pace; it's simple and direct. Although I noted in the review that the author seems to be able to turn out these books very quickly, she notes in the afterword that she accidentally deleted her first draft of this book which was 70% written and had to rewrite it again from scratch. Ouch! Alex Sol has several other books in a variety of genres, including science-fiction and horror, which might also be worth checking out. All her books are published in French and there are no English language editions at present.
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