2023-08-18 21:58:00
«L’Hallali» by Nicolas Lebel
Nicolas Lebel enjoys hunting. To the man. After the Game and the Capture, here is the Hallali: the last volume of the trilogy of the Furies (all three published by Éditions du Masque). A way of returning to the codes of the thriller, which abuses the investigator but also allows him to solve cases as he sees fit. “You will be able to do justice, the real one, the one that punishes the bad guys and wins in the end, when that of the States has failed, and renounced to prosecute criminals who have taken refuge outside the jurisdictions, out of reach and protected from the highest authorities, comfortably installed in their immunity, in their impunity”, he writes in the preamble. Extensive program.
So here is Yvonne Chen, an investigator who watches series while drinking mojitos and, in the evening, goes out to seek adventure in bars. Not very nice, Chen. But she has excuses. He was “killed by his colleague”. And she wants to find those who did it, a group of criminals called the Furies. To achieve this, she will infiltrate the clan. Take advantage of fancy dress parties organized by two brothers fighting over control of a prestigious vineyard in the Vosges. Flamboyant decor, refreshed atmosphere.
Who manipulates? Who is suing? Who hunts? Nicolas Lebel takes pleasure in plunging his characters “into the fryer”. Will his readers blame him? In the meantime, he often plays Dungeons and Dragons with his fellow crime writers. Like kids who like to write about death. AD
Hallali by Nicolas Lebel. Editions du Masque, 288 pp., €21.90 (ebook: €15.99).
“Bons Baisers d’Europe” by Philippe Mouche
It’s a jubilant and incredibly intelligent thriller. The hero, or rather the heroine, is Europe. A future Europe in which the identitarians, the nationalists and the earthlings (ecologists) would always be opposed, but also two peoples, the Tichodromes and the Holothurians, who recently joined the collective, united by the exaltation of Christian roots, the hatred of refugees and ease of encouraging anti-Semitism and racism. In that Europe, a man appears one day who is unlike any other. As a migrant, he learned throughout his wanderings the twenty-four official languages of the European Union (EU). His name is Fayez Barawi but his pseudonym is Bond, Fergus Bond.
His goal, to make Europe a land of stability, fraternity, openness, peace, a Europe that assumes its share of utopia, and he has such charisma that he is well on the way to achieving it. … Which does not at all please the Tichodromes and the Holothurians who are going to hire a contract killer, nicknamed the Iguana, to kill him. Except that nothing will go as planned.
In the end, a clever spy novel, wacky without being warf-warf as we hate, is a kind of salutary breath of fresh air. It’s rare to read such funny and exciting words about Europe, a subject that Philippe Mouche seems to know perfectly well. AS
Bons Baisers d’Europe by Philippe Mouche. Gaïa Editions, 288 pp., €22 (ebook: €16.99).
“The Alphabet of Silence” by Delphine Minoui
Not easy to tell in a novel the heartbreaks of Turkey under the influence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the very authoritarian president who has just been re-elected. However, Delphine Minoui achieves this with flying colors through a magnificent female character. Ayla teaches French at university. She is married to Göktay, a history professor at the University of the Bosphorus who campaigns without ostentation in favor of the oppressed and minorities. With their daughter Deniz, they led an uneventful life in Istanbul until the morning of January 2016 when the police came to board Göktay accused of “supporting terrorism”. His fault, having signed the “petition of academics for peace” which calls for the end of Turkish military operations in the Kurdish-majority Southeast. Ayla is devastated, she realizes that daily life was mostly assumed by Göktay and that she is struggling to get by. Little politicized, she begins by resenting her husband for having put his family in danger for a simple signature at the bottom of a petition. She allows herself to sink until the day her university forces her to come back to work. There, she understands that her students are proud of her and of her husband’s fight, in particular Azad, a student of Kurdish origin who will make her want to get involved in turn and move heaven and earth to free Goktay. Through it, it is the Turkey of recent years that this journalist tells us about Figaro, from the 2015 coup to the hunt for academic critics of the regime. A beautiful ode to combat through words. AS
The Alphabet of Silence by Delphine Minoui. The Iconoclast, 270 pp., €20 (ebook: €14.99).
“Jolene, are you a dyke?” by Laurent Chalumeau
We all know Dolly Parton, this American country singer made up like a stolen car and whose cult song, Jolene, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide since 1973. Or so we think. to know. In reality, we know nothing about this rather unique woman, who keeps the same face and the same look over the years with scalpels, wigs, foundation and plastic nails. Hence the interest of this book by Laurent Chalumeau who, with his very own language, tells us in detail about the incredible life of this woman. She was born in 1946 in a cabin in East Tennessee, “almost among the madmen of Deliverance”, he specifies, without running water or electricity where she will have to squeeze in with her some thirteen brothers and sisters. To understand what she has become and why, you have to know this sentence that she would have pronounced one day: “I built my character by taking inspiration from the whore of the village that I sometimes saw when I was little. I didn’t know what she was doing, just that she was this beautiful blonde lady with a complicated hairstyle, high heels, and tight skirts. […]. My mom used to say, “Pfff, she’s a bitch.” And I said to myself, that’s what I want to be when I grow up, a “bitch”. Officially married to the same man for sixty years, “the male version of Columbo’s wife”, whom we never see, Dolly Parton is above all fused with Judy, a childhood friend who has become her assistant. Hence the title. AS
Jolene are you a dyke? by Laurent Chalumeau, Editions du Kif, 221 pp., €12.
“The Fault” by Franck Thilliez
Franck Thilliez, 49, is one of the best French sellers of thrillers with Guillaume Musso, Jean-Christophe Grangé and Bernard Minier. Of the type to easily exceed the 700,000 copies sold. The native of Annecy with Chtis roots and who lives in Pas-de-Calais also officiates successfully for TV (Alex Hugo, Vortex, etc.) or comics, when his books are not adapted by others (la Chambre deaths, Syndrome E, etc.). Those who have already read it know: the pleasure with him is that of the puff of adrenaline, the thrill of dread.
Its ability to resonate with the times is the hallmark of Thilliez. In La Faille, which revolves around his favorite character, police commander Sharko, whom he happily mistreats, he notably questions the debate on brain-damaged people, whose brains are dead and who are only kept alive through machines. Should they be unplugged or not? As in the Vincent Lambert case (which is mentioned), there is a family clash. Thilliez adds weight to the picture by adding the destiny of a foetus. But it captures the complexity of the situation, the battle of personal, medical, ethical and political issues. The ex-computer engineer also questions, again, the excesses of the Web, “the nauseating undergrounds of the prohibited Web”.
All in all, we take away from the Faille that nothing is better than family, friendship, a “simple” life, to keep a foothold in a world conducive to vertigo and delirium. Very classic. But in the meantime, Thilliez has had its effect. S.C.
La Faille by Franck Thilliez, Black River, 504 pp., €22.90.
«True Crime Story» de Joseph Knox
It’s a very clever whodunnit, a pastiche of a book-document on a news item, in which the author gets involved in the affair, in a less than glamorous or even disturbing light. Joseph Knox announces that he is republishing the investigation of one of his friends, who died there. He would act out of guilt: she inflated him with his obsession for the disappearance of a student and he did not believe her when she said she was threatened. “Perhaps you will see the danger sooner than we do,” he simpers at the reader’s attention. You may be the person who could have done what I didn’t, and prevented another needless death.”
Zoe, 19, was living in a halls of residence in Manchester when she went missing. She was lovely, serious, artist (singer), appreciated by all, she had a boyfriend. At least that’s the picture, a priori. Except that as soon as you start scratching, especially on the side of your entourage, the reality appears much less smooth. The gallery of characters is also very successful. The twin sister but pale copy who persisted in distinguishing herself from the supposedly perfect, the roommate devoted to a frightening point, the hyper-beautiful and overnarcissistic boyfriend, the shy but leech confidant, the vaguely constantly stoned boyfriend… Not to mention the parents of Zoe, not that protective. The book mixes testimonies, correspondence, press articles, emails, excerpts from police reports, photos, we believe it. To the point of going to check if Zoe existed. S.C.
True Crime Story by Joseph Knox, translated from English by Jean Esch, Éditions du Masque, 414 pp, €22.50.
The Lioness by Francois Dupaquier
Tara Vaillant is an extraordinary policewoman whom her boss and her teammates call “Dragon”. Squad leader at the Bobigny police station, where she is respected and appreciated, she is beautiful and impulsive, fueled by coke, alcohol and one-night stands. On her back, she got a tattoo of a dragon that runs along her spine and fascinates both men and women. Recently, however, she has not been in her normal state. Her mother has just been taken away by cancer without having told her everything she should have told her and this silence eats away at the young woman.
It was then that two former members of Daesh were killed in Paris. Sent to the scene, Tara wants to understand why and by whom. She tries to get the dangerous Akim Alami, one of the leaders of the terrorist organization, locked up in prison under high surveillance, to talk. And, to better understand the geopolitical context, she approaches the Kurdish cultural center which will direct her to a restaurant where an old woman, Ajda, will help her in her quest. Everything brings our heroine back to Iraq, where Tara was born while her parents were on a mission. She goes there and her distant memories overwhelm her. When she falls into a Daesh ambush, she understands that someone in Paris has spoken: few of them know that she is in Iraq. Repatriated to Paris, she continues her investigation, personal and police. Until the unimaginable happens.
La Lionne is a thrilling and thrilling thriller on the fate of the Kurds and the ravages of Daesh. She is above all a very beautiful female character, complex in her solidity mixed with fragility. AS
The Lioness, François Dupaquier, Flammarion, 454 pp, €22.
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