Dreary but worth reading for its insight into its sad, flawed, and sometimes-repellent characters.
A waitress’s disappearance pits a dogged detective against a man trapped by his own falsehoods.
Manfred Baumann is an unusually regular regular at the Restaurant de la Cloche in Saint-Louis, a nondescript town at the far edge of Alsace. He always eats at the same table, drinks a carafe of wine one glass at a time even though he ends up paying twice as much, and has a secret crush on Adèle Bedeau, the sullen young waitress. Years ago, Manfred’s grandfather bought the restaurant for his parents, but it slipped through their hands, and Manfred remains an awkward patron on the fringe of life. By day he’s a bank manager; once a week he joins in a poker game at the restaurant; and he has a regular appointment at a brothel in a ritual that never changes. But Adèle interests him, and one night he hides in some bushes to watch her meet her boyfriend and ride off with him on a motor scooter. When she doesn’t show up for work the next day, Manfred is so embarrassed about spying on her that he lies to Inspector Georges Gorski—then continues lying, even about things like having changed his normal lunch order the day Adèle disappeared. Despite his aversion to hunches, Gorski has a strong intuition that Manfred is covering up something. Gorski often recalls, and even revisits, the scene of an old murder, a case that the once-junior detective hoped would advance him into a better position in a bigger city. Instead, he’s still stuck in a provincial town and a loveless marriage, but his dedication to his work drives him to push Manfred harder. Gorski’s persistence only increases Manfred’s innate paranoia, and a door to the past leads to unintended consequences for both the hunter and the hunted. Burnet (His Bloody Project, 2016) sets up the book as an old French mystery that he’s newly translated, attaching a “translator’s afterword” to the back, but the metafictional elements add little to the novel.
Dreary but worth reading for its insight into its sad, flawed, and sometimes-repellent characters.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2309-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.
“It is a dangerous time to be alive.” Indeed, as this fast-paced thriller by seasoned mysterian Pavone (The Travelers, 2016, etc.) proves.
A siren wails in Paris, a once-rare sound often heard in these times of terror. It’s gone off because a jihadi has strapped a bomb to himself and is standing in front of the Louvre, “in the epicenter of Western civilization,” waiting for his moment. But is he a jihadi? Who’s put him up to this dastardly deed, and why? That’s for Kate Moore, deep-cover CIA agent, “sidewalk-swimming in a sea of expat moms,” to suss out. Kate lives in a shadow world, so hidden away that even her hedge-fund-master husband doesn’t have a clue about what she does: “Dexter has been forced to accept that she’s entitled to her secrets,” Pavone writes, adding, “He’s had plenty of his own.” Indeed, and in the shadowy parallel world of speculative finance, he’s teamed up with a fast-living entrepreneur who wants nothing more than to become superrich and run off with his “assistant-concubine.” Hunter Forsyth is about to announce a huge deal, but suddenly he’s disappeared, whisked away by shadowy people who, by the thin strings of suspense, have something to do with that bomb across town. So does a vengeful young mom, strapped to a useless husband and bent on payback for a long-ago slight. All this is red meat to Kate, who’s tired of the domestic life, no matter how much a sham, and is happier than a clam when “running her network of journalists, bloggers, influencers, as well as drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and cops, plus diplomats and soldiers, maitre d’s and concierges and bartenders and shopkeepers.” With all those players, mercenaries, and assorted bad guys thrown into the mix, you just know that the storyline is going to be knotty, and it resolves in a messy spatter of violence that’s trademark Pavone and decidedly not for the squeamish.
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6150-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson—and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash—a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19597-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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