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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...

Such is the high bar that Olivier Norek has set for me progressively over his previous Victor Coste and standalone thrillers, that I couldn't help approach Impact with some trepidation (and I will no doubt feel the same when I get up to date with  Dans les brumes de Capelans his first post-SDPJ 93 Coste novel). It isn't particularly reassuring that in outline the book is about the social and political impact of climate change on developing nations, which seems a little out of the author's comfort zone and where there is always the risk of it being preachy. Still, it's not so long ago that I read his stunning crime-thriller take on the immigrant crisis in Entre deux mondes , so I remained fairly optimistic that I would still enjoy and be enlightened by Impact . And indeed any concerns I might have had were soon put to rest, and I didn't even need to wait to get to Chapter 3, when we are back on the familiar ground of a police investigation in Paris, where psycholo...

Having finished the Victor Coste SDPJ 93 trilogy (The Banlieues trilogy in English translation), Olivier Norek has taken in several standalone books in a greater variety of situations. The first, Entre deux mondes  (Between Two Worlds), starts out in the complex contemporary real-world of global war, politics and espionage, and the impact it has on ordinary people. It's the kind of thing Gerard Seymour does so well, particularly in how what is happening in the Middle East connects with and touches on our shores. 'Our' meaning the UK but also as far as Norek is concerned and where he finds his own angle on the subject, with France. Where they often meet, in the dangerous crossing between one world and the next, is in the channel between Calais and the English coast. Entre deux mondes indeed opens with a situation that is turning for the worse in the Mediterranean, between Libya and the planned destination for 273 refugees on their way to Italy, before highlighting another t...

Olivier Norek's Victor Coste/Banlieues Trilogy goes to some grim places where drugs and violent crime crime is rampant in Paris, but the third book in the series  Surtensions (published in English as  Breaking Point ) opens up in one of the grimmest of all: the penitentiary of Marveil. Overcrowded and with the worst criminals locked away, with fewer than one warden per 100 prisoners, the wisest thing to do is keep your head down and stay safe. That goes for the guards as much as the prisoners, but that's easier said than done, as detainee 4657, 22 year old of Corsican origin, Nunzio Mosconi, known as Nano, finds out when sharing a cell with a brute like Machine. The first part of Surtensions feels like it covers ground we've been over many times before. " Il n'existe pas d'endroit plus dangereux, inégal et injuste que la prison... La prison comme une école du crime. " It deals with the daily beatings, rapes and mistreatment of Nano, and it's not pre...

Although it opens in a scene and setting familiar to his Code 93 series (and there is a brief cameo of one of Captain Coste's SDPJ 93 team), Surface is a very different style and pace from Olivier Norek, out of the crime and drug murders of the high rise suburbs of Paris and out in the country. It starts off in familiar territory however, with drug squad officer Noémie Chastain shot in the face attempting the arrest of a drug dealer in just such a location. She is left with life-changing injuries, suffering nightmares and PTSD in the aftermath. Even after a long recovery period and psychological treatment, she finds that she is still not ready to return to duties in the city and is offered a temporary transfer to a station in a small village in the south of France, Decazeville in the Aveyron region. It's not a straightforward transfer, Noémi is expected to write a report on the possible closure of the station due to budget cutbacks and a notable lack of any serious crime in t...

Code 93 , the first book in Olivier Norek's 'Banlieues Trilogy', a policier  series dealing with the modern day realities of violent drug crime in the suburbs of Paris, gets off to an intriguing start with two separate, but inevitably connected, strange and inexplicable deaths. It's 2011, and although Camille has been reported missing for a long time, when her family are invited to morgue to identify the body of a dead young woman who has clearly suffered drugs and sexual abuse, they refuse to recognise that the woman is Camille. Soon after, the body of a large man is found by security guard in an abandoned warehouse near the canal with three bullet wounds and no pulse. When the autopsy is carried out however, it is discovered that he hasn't actually been shot at all, it's just he is wearing the shirt of a man who has been shot three times. He may not have been shot, but he has been castrated while alive. And speaking of alive it turns out that the 'corpse...

Paris has recently seen an increase in drug related executions. That's usually a matter for the Drug Squad, but Captain Victor Coste's Crime 1 team in SDPJ 93, (Saint-Denis Police Judiciare) have been called in when a victim is discovered in a parking garage of an apartment block in Malceny, a HLM high-rise complex in a district that the police usually keep well away from. The victim has been taped to a chair and tortured before being killed in a unit where drugs are usually stashed. Three killings in a week, all drug related, have taken out three quarters of the crime drug bosses in the region meaning Crime 1 have to work alongside the Drug Squad.  Bad news for Coste, and for a few unfortunate elderly people the gangs have pressed into minding drugs and weapons in their apartments, but bad news also for the mayor of Malceny-Bobigny, Andrea Vesperini. She relied on the drug lords to bring her in guaranteed voters in exchange favours, jobs in city hall, free holidays and money u...