I must say that it’s been a while since I devoured a good thriller and well it’s done now with “Soleil Levant” by Alexandre Galien at Michel Lafon. As often in the field, I discovered that this book was part ofa series of surveys. That is to say that we can read them independently of each other but that we also find recurring characters from one story to another.
The hero of Galen’s latest Best Sellers is called Philipe Valmy and he was a legend of the judicial police. But in full depression it will change career. It was without counting the discovery of a corpse at the Crillon a Parisian palace.
The latter is that of a Japanese businessman who seems to have killed himself but the question arises of the staging. Because this scene reminds the way of a certain Ziggy, a drug addict that Valmy knows well. He will therefore be recalled to elucidate this case.
We feel that everything is very fair in Galen’s universe and that’s no coincidence. He himself was a policeman for 5 years so he knows this world by heart and depicts it very well for us, a bit like an Olivier Marshall. He describes the adaptation to new technologies, the discomfort of the police, the heaviness of the procedures but also shocking attitudes. We will thus meet the young Commissioner Alice Quinet, victim of sexism on the part of her colleagues and of the impostor syndrome who will have to prove herself, but we are also confronted with the milieu of marginalized people and drug addicts.
It’s well written, it’s fast. We want to know what’s next. And hats off also to Galen for his meticulous description of Paris whom he seems to know like the back of his hand. It just made me want to read Vallmy’s previous investigations: “The scars of the night” and “The breath of the night”. Well, but today the one I recommend is “Soleil rising” you won’t let go and that’s what a policeman is asked to do.