To The Last Page

Absent from the second book in the series while Élise Duromain undertook a solo adventure - definitely going out on her own in À bout de souffle  - Lucas Lievens returns for his own solo investigation in the third book in Alex Sol's series, but going solo is the only option for Lievens. Already retired from the police even before the start of the series, he is still unable to shake off his own personal loss, Lucas now operates a Private Investigator service with only one real purpose; to find missing children. Yes, it seems like the missing person theme is continuing after the previous two books in the series, but as you would expect there is a subtle difference in each investigation that expands into something entirely different. Lucas Lievens operates to his own rules then, and in the case of his investigations, he only helps find abducted children: hopefully alive but it's more often the case that after several days of police investigation without result, he is searching fo...

Jérémie Claes makes very clear - even brutally clear - the source and nature of the conflict at the heart of his second novel, Commandant Solane ; immigration. The scene is set by the shock opening section detailing the brutal killing of a Muslim shop owner in Belgium, but it's the border between Italy and France that is to become the centre of attention when forty-two bodies are washed up on a French Mediterranean shore. Former police officer Bernard Solane, who has retired to the Provence region, is shocked at the state of the carbonised dead bodies, many of them children, washing up on La Bocca beach in Cannes. Solane's instinct is to fish the bodies out of the sea, but the inaction of the horrified holidaymakers sunning themselves on the the beach is just as shocking. Despite a similar unusual reticence on the part of the local politicians and police force to investigate, he is determined to find out what happened. The conflict that arises out of this incident then is not d...

Frédéric Paulin is a French writer of romans noirs , a different kind of policier from the more common police-detective crime thriller, one more involved in current affairs and geopolitics. I'm not familiar with this genre, the only other one I can think of that I've read in French is Jean-Patrick Manchette whose works date back to the 1970s and the world has moved on since then ...and not necessarily for the better. I'm not aware of many notable authors writing in this genre in English. The closest I can think of - and he is a writer I greatly admire for his knowledge and insights into the human within state affairs - is Gerald Seymour.  La nuit tombée sur nos âmes (literally 'The Fallen Night on Our Souls' or perhaps 'Dark Night of the Soul'?) deals with the events surrounding the protests and riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, a blend of real life political figures on the fringes and fictional characters involved in the central conflict betwe...

The directness of the title ('Mathilde has disappeared' or 'Mathilde is missing') is reflected in the style of the opening chapters of Leno Solveig's Mathilde a disparu , even in the chapter titles which lay out which person's testimony we are getting, the time and the place. Everything is clearly outlined. Apart from the opening chapter ' Fin de l'histoire ', which sets up the conclusion (see what I mean?), the narrative in the main takes a direct procedural approach of the 26-year-old Mathilde being reported missing and the police investigation as it interviews friends, family and co-workers trying to find out what has happened to the young woman. The frantic phone call to the police station in Carvin (north France) comes from Mathilde's worried parents, and as brigadier-chef Rémy interviews the young woman's neighbours, work colleagues and former boyfriend Théo, it quickly becomes apparent that there is indeed good reason for concern. Abdu...

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 d...

First published in 2023 at around 650 pages long Alex Sol's À la vue de tous ('In Plain Sight') is the first book in the author's Les enquêtes d'Elise Duromain et Lucas Lievens series, which she has somehow managed to follow up in quick succession with three further investigations. You get the impression that Sol must be able to write as quickly as you can read her books, and they are certainly designed to be read at a pace. Thankfully, at least on this first opening book in the series, it's clear that there has been no compromise in the quality of the writing. 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 se...

Ludovic Deblois, to judge by his previous novel Inversion - a frighteningly realistic portrayal of technological innovation and advances when placed in the hands of corrupt powers - doesn't have a particularly rosy outlook on the future. His latest novel Il suffit parfois d’un cri… (which you could maybe translate not literally as 'A Cry in the Wilderness' or 'A Voice in the Wild'?) is again set in the immediate future and, inspired by animal life and our relationship with nature, you would have to say it does not appear to be any more optimistic about our future. And you would have to conclude that it might be for a good reason. Concerned about the climate and mankind's lack of willingness to confront serious ecological and environmental issues, the author's lates novel again forces us to think seriously about some important matters that, having seen how quickly things have changed in the last few years, might not be that far away from becoming reality. B...

Chien 51 is a science-fiction novel set in what appears to be a near-future reality or an alternative reality. There are more than a few elements that have echoes with the present day, or extensions on them that don't feel too far away from where we are now. In an unspecified year, the world is run by global corporations, and at the start of the novel we learn that Greece has collapsed economically and been bought over by a corporation called GoldTex. (Interestingly, in an uncanny echo with the uncertainties currently in the real world we find that Venezuela has also been similarly 'purchased' with somewhat less disturbance than the protests and street riots that occurred with the collapse of Greece). The huge corporations are too powerful however and any insurrection is quickly put down. The fall of Greece was 20 years ago now, and the population of the country put to good use working for GoldTex, those with good qualifications sent to work in Magnapole as ' cilariés ...

Most French policiers and indeed most English language crime fiction novels feature police or detectives pitted against criminals and killers, but we know that the police have to deal with far more than that in their line of work, and the nature of crime in the modern world is changing rapidly. In Paris alone there have been many serious real world challenges faced by the PJ ( Police Judiciaire ) and emergency services in recent years from terrorist attacks but all of that is just pointing to a larger scale issue that is approached in Christophe Molmy's Brûlez tout ("Burn Everything"), a novel which has been awarded the 2026 Prix du Quai des Orfèvres. The success and the significant mark that Brûlez tout makes is in how it turns its attention not just to rather more contemporary issues, but how it looks behind the front page headlines and considers some of the underlying issues that have the potential - the extreme likelihood rather - of occurring again in the future. ...

I wouldn't say that he works to a formula, but there are a number of familiar Franck Thilliez features evident at the start of his third novel Deuils de miel , published in 2006 following the Sharko debut Train d'enfer pour ange rouge and the Lucie Henebelle debut La chambre des morts . Aside from Sharko's dark brooding violence, to be expected after Train d’enfer pour ange rouge , there is the discovery of the body of a naked dead woman in an elaborately staged scene in a church confessional. Like another exchange that I referred to in the later novel Atom[ka] indicating the way ahead for a disturbing case, Sharko observes early on here that " en est parti pour une longue et macabre affaire ". Knowing Thilliez that will certainly be backed up, but it's already evident in the bizarre nature of the opening scene. Found dead and naked in a church confessional is the least of it. The victim here has had live butterflies stuck to her shaved head, and indeed all ...

There are a number of features that give Si la bête s’éveille ('If the Beast Awakens') a somewhat unusual character for a crime thriller, much of them likely to do with the author Frédéric Lepage having an extensive CV in film, essay writing, TV and documentary outside of his crime fiction writing. Whether you think there is maybe too much emphasis on subjects not directly related to the crime, or whether this is an advantage that lifts the novel above the average - the novel won the Prix Cognac for the best French language crime novel in 2021 - it does raise some interesting philosophical, psychological and behavioural questions that are worth considering outside the context of the crime thriller. In the first chapter of Si la bête s’éveille  we are introduced (in italics in the past) to Adam Leaf as a young man being brought up by grandmother Ariana. It's hinted that he has a strong sense of justice, preparing to attack a store that short changed his grandmother. He lear...

There aren't many contemporary French crime writers that make it into English translation, which includes a complete absence of a major writer like Franck Thilliez. Olivier Norek - another truly great writer - has been a little more fortunate with his Banlieus trilogy making it over, but aside from these Captain Coste thrillers there is a bit of catching up to do and all of them of a very high standard. It's gratifying to at least see Entre deux mondes due to make an appearance in translation next week as Between Two Worlds. Although the latter is a masterpiece, what everyone really wants is the new Coste novel, and even though he quit the SDPJ 93, Paris and indeed France at the end of Surtensions , that only intrigues where the writer might take him next. The answer is in Dans les brumes des Capelans - in the Capelans fog. We were given some clue about where he was headed, but despite now being located some 1,500km away, Coste is still technically in France. He is also stil...

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 the 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 sever...

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 Temps 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 s...

Essentially, Louise Mey's La deuxième femme ('The Second Wife', or 'The Second Woman' as the English language edition prefers to name it) appears to be one of those exploitative thrillers where a vulnerable woman begins to suspect that she doesn't really know the man she is living with, that he keeps secrets from her and that she may become a victim. That's not to say that the situation is not a very real one, or at least the underlying sentiment is real and relatable even if not every woman lives with a murderer or would-be murderer. The strength of this one however is in the level of detail, the writing conveying the whole complexity of feelings and realisations not just about the present situation, but to the backgrounds that give rise to how people behave and react. Moved by a television appeal by a man who she refers to for most of the book only as “ l’homme qui pleure ” (the crying man) Sandrine joins in the search for his missing wife. She sees in hi...