Irène

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Irène (MacLehose Press, 2014).


Well, I had an idea where this crime thriller was going, and while I was not right, I read about eighty pages with my teeth on edge. It was the sort of climax where it didn't really matter how close to the answer the reader gets, what happens isn't going to make anybody happy.

Writer Pierre LeMaitre has written three novels about a commandant in the Paris police force named Camille Verhoeven. It's taken a little while for them to be published in English, and, foolishly, the second of the books, Alex, was released in the US ahead of this one. I'm really glad that I didn't read that one first.

Commandant Verhoeven has a very ugly case in this book. The brutal and really graphically-described murder of two prostitutes is soon tied in to one cold case elsewhere in France and another in Scotland. Verhoeven's team quickly connects them, despite radical differences between all three crimes. There is a small "signature" tying them together, but they otherwise do not appear to be the work of the same killer. Then someone realizes that one of the killings is uncannily like the one described by Bret Easton Ellis in his novel American Psycho, and the race is on, not only to catch the killer, but also to figure out where in fiction the killer got the inspiration for the other murders.

With a very informed journalist pushing his way into the investigation, a bookseller who's suspiciously eager to help, a wife who is due to give birth within days, and the very real probability that one of his detectives is leaking information, Verhoeven is seeing his case get worse and worse as leads about the serial killer flood in. About two-thirds in, I started having the very bad feeling that the killer's final crime wouldn't be drawn from prose fiction, but from a certain feature film directed by David Fincher... and then Verhoeven's wife doesn't answer the telephone...

It's a good book, to be certain, but it's very grisly and very graphic and not for younger readers or those, as the BBC used to say, "of a nervous disposition." It's dark and bleak and while I'm interested in reading Alex, I need a little more brightness and sunshine before I tackle it. Recommended with mild reservations.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.