Beyond the gore, sordid crimes, twisted characters and frantic chases, thrillers are often a powerful tool of denunciation. This is the case here. Of course, there is a crime at the start of all this: a policewoman is murdered in the heart of London and her colleagues will take more than 600 pages to search every corner of the megalopolis to find the culprit. But quickly, we will understand that the main subject of this big book is elsewhere and that it involves much more than a police hunt. It is the denunciation of a terrible scourge: that of FGM (for female genital mutilation) imposed on young girls from certain black communities, even before their puberty.
Elizabeth George places the majority of her novels in England, as we know, even if she has lived in California since her childhood. One thing to hide is already the twentieth investigation of its inspector Thomas Linley, a straightforward man, English through and through, surrounded by a rather special team made up of two investigators; Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. The novel begins in a working-class neighborhood in north-east London, where members of the Nigerian community gather, near the Ridley Road market.
At the center of the action, a family, the Bankoles, and in this family an eight-year-old girl, Simisola, whom her sinister father is about to have circumcised, despite the opposition of his eldest son, in order to be able to sell her to the best price to a good Nigerian like ‘virgin and pure’.
The mother, Monifa, does not question the operation since tradition dictates it, but she wants it to be done in the best possible conditions, contrary to what she herself experienced.
Add to that an omnipresent heat wave and a policewoman of African origin who tracks down circumcisers and who is found dead at home, her skull smashed: all the elements of the drama are there.
As in all Elizabeth George’s novels built on the model of ” whodunit – who is the culprit – the intrigue, complicated by the intense private life of the police officer Teodora Bontempi, will keep you in suspense throughout. Especially since the translation faithfully reflects the feverishness and urgency of the subject.
But it is primarily the characters and the description of the environments in which they live that give the novel its almost sociological flavor. Elizabeth George manages to describe the color and intensity of working-class London with an intensity reminiscent of Dickens. And when we see the extent and importance of the dark reality that it tracks here, we can only recommend this difficult book to you, without any reservations.
There are denunciations more essential than others… and this book is a concrete example.