On edge
A particularly successful thriller, Who is here ? will leave you on edge. The plot is complex and built on a series of overhangs and prevarications. We will travel through Sweden then Albania in the footsteps of a five-year-old girl whose parents were brutally murdered… and we will discover arms traffickers. With, as a result, leaks coming from inside the police station itself and which will, once again, put the lives of young children at stake. Fascinating characters, including Commissioner Ewert Grens, a particularly gruff old shrewd, an “infiltrator” too, Hoffman, remarkably far-sighted and creative, and a grown-up little girl who was no longer expected… and especially not where we find her. All of this is based on an extraordinary art of cutting and staging brilliantly rendered by the translation. We will note here the exceptional mastery of Anders Roslund who is however used to writing with four hands – especially with Börge Hellström – and who keeps the reader in suspense as is (almost) not allowed.
Michael Belair
Who is here ?
★★★ 1/2
Anders Roslund, translated from Swedish by Catherine Renaud, Mazarine, Paris, 2022, 496 pages
An amazing breath
A discovery. As much for the writing as for the richness of the moral argument around a question that seems innocuous, but which puts everything into perspective: what is the weight of friendship? We seem far from the polar, but, on the contrary, all that arises in the swander on the occasion of a bloody murder committed in a small Finnish town during an unnamed drinking party spread over several days and involving dozens of people with much more than weakened faculties. Three main characters: the victim, the murderer and the police commissioner who has delegated the case to two of his investigators. These three men had known each other twenty years earlier: the killer and the policeman were even the best friends in the world when faced with the grotesque brute who terrorized the schoolyard before turning into a victim. Before and now. The time of oaths and that of the sad reality that has become the life of the policeman like those of the other two. A breath and an astonishing rigor. A way also to describe the outside, nature and the others that we no longer forget, even the closed book…
Michael Belair
The oath
★★★ 1/2
Arttu Tuominen, translated from Finnish by Anne Colin du Terrail, La Martinière, Paris, 2022, 432 pages
The supervenient
Narrator of The Sudbury Arsonist, Emmanuelle left Montreal a few years ago. She has since lived in Sudbury, which she observes with superficial indifference. She earns her living by designing websites. She has a lover. Caesar. In fact, she had a lover. He hasn’t given her any sign of life for months. Ordinary. Or not: he doesn’t want to know anything about her anymore or is he one of those men who disappear from the streets of the city? The question comes to Em when one of the missing is found. Dead. The young woman wants to see things clearly. So she searches in the night. And so approaches Caesar’s wife, the enigmatic Dr. Herman. There will be risk and peril in the delay. For this first novel, the poet Chloé LaDuchesse, also an expatriate from Montreal, searches, with a smirk, the slums of her adopted city, which she populates with characters as fascinating as they are numerous. Change of scenery guaranteed by the place, the style, the language and the way of approaching the noir novel.
Sonia Sarfati
The Sudbury Arsonist
★★★ 1/2
Chloé LaDuchesse, Heliotrope noir, Montreal, 2022, 243 pages
Outlaw, take heart
British novelist Chris Whitaker tells the story of the United States so well, it’s like being there, in this small coastal town in California called Cape Haven. Among its inhabitants, characters with revealing (sur)names. Walk, the tottering sheriff. Star, whose light faded 30 years earlier when her younger sister died. King, found responsible for the child’s death. Darke, the dark businessman. And Star’s daughter, “the outlaw Duchess Day Radley”, as she announces, from the height of her 13 years, to whoever gets in her way. Today more than ever, the teenager takes care of her mother who drifts in life; and Robin, his fragile little brother. Because the drama comes to hit them again.Duchess is a wonderful hybrid novel. Here, initiatory story. There, black novel. Elsewhere, psychological drama. Elsewhere, legal thriller. So many fibers that Chris Whitaker skilfully braids, breathing soul into his characters and body into a story that sometimes floats a little, but which can cling to an unwavering anchor, Duchess.
Sonia Sarfati
Duchess
★★★
Chris Whitaker, translated from English (England) by Julie Sibony, Sonatine, Paris, 2022, 519 pages