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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...

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...

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...