Ceux qui vont mourir te saluent - Fred Vargas
Always seeking to find a distinctive and original way of presenting crime fiction, just before she embarked on a series of novels featuring the "three evangelists", Fred Vargas came up with a triumvirate of Roman emperors as figures in her earlier 1994 novel (as yet still unpublished in English) Ceux qui vont mourir te saluent ('Those who are about to die salute you'). The book also has several other prototypical elements that would become part of her style, even though that style is yet to fully develop and this book is a little more conventional as a crime thriller. Being Vargas of course, that means it's still not all that conventional. The crime and murder element is about as close as it gets to standard murder mystery, the characterisation is much less so. Henri Valhubert, a French art historian, has been presented with a rare unseen Michelangelo sketch and suspects that it might be part of a trafficking of items from the archives of the Vatican. He makes t...