À bout de souffle - Alex Sol

I have to say I was surprised that Alex Sol chose to follow up the epic disappearance-on-a-subway-train mystery of her first Les enquêtes d'Elise Duromain et Lucas Lievens thriller À la vue de tous with the mystery of another disappearance on a moving train. There's no Lucas Lievens this time and Police Commissioner Élise Duromain is actually off-duty when she is witness to what appears to be a live abduction on the train she is on travelling back to Paris. She is even actually sitting in the seat in front of the lady Barbara, who is distraught when her 6 year-old son Gabriel disappears within a matter of minutes while she looked for an unoccupied toilet. No, you think, it can't be another case like the last one, and even Duromain tries to convince herself, but it does sound more like a case of trying to convince the reader that this one is different.

While it might be related to an extent in terms of the author having another thought or variation on a theme, as the case develops it certainly proves to be different and still no less compelling than the first book in this series. In contrast to À la vue de tous however, this one is initially a little more of a slow burner - literally, as it is happening in the middle of a ferocious heatwave. The difference between this 'locked room' or locked train carriage mystery and the previous one is that it is investigated live in-situ. The child has disappeared into thin air while Élise is on board the train and even though on holiday, having attended her sister's wedding in Toulouse, she is right in the middle of the disappearance or abduction.

The first half of the investigation then kind of takes place 'in real time' on a moving train of fourteen carriages, which has its own kind of urgency about it, but there are a few more complicating factors to keep you on your toes. The opening prologue indicates that this may (almost certainly) be related to the abduction/disappearance of another child, neglected by its mother after a drunken party. Unable for some reason to report it to the police, she goes to a private detective agency, where one of the agency's investigators, Valentine, reluctant to take on what is really police work nonetheless has her own reasons for listening to the woman's story.

Meanwhile the train is 20 minutes from the stop in Limoges and so far Élise has been unable to locate Gabriel. She must now act on the supposition that they are dealing with an abduction and she needs to take control of the situation before anyone is allowed to leave the train. What this situation also enables the author to do in contrast to previous book, is consider suspects in real time among the passengers on board the 14 carriage train. There are a few obvious false leads thrown in there, but the stakes are raised considerably when a few passengers put the live events out on social media.

But all this is only for starters and there are inevitably revelations to come when the train makes its stop and the novel moves onto another stage of its race against time. Duromain has to deal not only with a challenging live case, but has to handle the consequences of being involved in a case outside her jurisdiction when she isn't even on duty. That causes headaches all around, but at least her own superior officer knows what to expect on that front. Even as further revelations start arriving though, you know that it still doesn't all add up and that there is another surprise waiting in the next chapter, compelling you to fairly tear through the book and eagerly anticipate getting on to the next one.

Not that it needs to be made any more tense than it already moving from one stressed captive environment with no air conditioning in the middle of a ferocious heatwave to another, but Alex Sol takes us to the limit - yet again - in a situation that makes it almost impossible to put this book down for even a few minutes. There are some other noticeable differences between this and the previous investigation, but most importantly what they both have in common is in the mounting tension that Alex Sol is able to carry through from chapter to chapter. À bout de souffle - "breathless" - is well named in that regard. 

That quality was there too with À la vue de tous, but here the twists are much more convincingly laid out, I think. More than a sensational thriller, there is also a tragic human story here - more than one - that gives this book an extra edge. The progress and development of that story and the complication of the human sentiments and actions, linking a chain of events alongside the hunt side of story and the police procedural and jurisdictional aspects is masterful (needing a worthwhile few chapters of "debriefing" epilogue). À bout de souffle is another impressive piece of edge-of-the-seat thriller writing from Alex Sol.

Reading notes: À bout de souffle 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 Les enquêtes d'Elise Duromain et Lucas Lievens series. The books are published in French and there are no English language editions, but the author's writing seems to me to be very easy to read in French at pace; simple and direct. I'll be following on to the next book in the series as soon as I can.