THE UNKNOWN WOMAN OF THE SEINE

With the 1889 Paris Exposition as a backdrop, Hansen’s whodunit is a mélange of the strange, the infamous, and the grisly.

In a morgue not far from Notre Dame de Paris, a daily display of unidentified bodies has become a macabre public attraction. Among the cadavers lies a beautiful young woman with a Mona Lisa smile, pulled from the Seine, a presumed suicide. A preface reveals that the real woman called “L’Inconnue,” or "the Unknown," whose plaster death mask became a sensational objet d’art, was not only the model for the first CPR dummy, but the source of endless speculation as to the circumstances of her demise. This speculation drives the extended flashback that comprises most of Hansen’s novel. We first see the woman—alive, that is—in a forest near the road to Paris. She has killed a man who, the reader assumes, has raped her and buried his body ineptly. She then enters a nearby covered wagon, pulled by a donkey, and drives it to Paris. En route, there’s a chance encounter with Brassard, a disgraced police officer who senses she’s behind the dead body he and his dog discovered earlier, disinterred by wolves. Brassard surreptitiously tails the wagon to Paris. A colorful panoply of peripheral characters, including a hapless artist and an “impresario of the lower entertainments,” and settings like the Paris catacombs and, of course, the newly erected Eiffel Tower distracts us from the meandering irrelevancies of the plot. By investigating the young woman, is Brassard seeking to overcome the contretemps that led him to join a Foreign Legion mission to Indochina and lose an ear? Is the novel really about the sexual abuse the unknown woman endures in life and her objectification after death? Or is it merely a display case for Hansen’s gorgeous prose, which sometimes sacrifices meaning on the altar of mellifluousness?

The main attraction here is a troubled detective who doesn’t fit the mold.