Blood Red Rivers - Softcover

Grange, Jean-Christophe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099449021 ISBN 13: 9780099449027

Publisher: Vintage, 2003

Synopsis

In a world of knife-edge glaciers a hideous crime leads two maverick detectives to confront the limits of human evil. A corpse is discovered wedged in an isolated crevice. It has been horribly mutilated. The brilliant but violent ex-commando Pierre Niémans is sent from Paris to the French Alps to lead the investigation. Meanwhile, in a town in south-west France, Karim Abdouf, a young Arab policeman, is trying to find out why the tomb of a young child has been desecrated. When a second baby is found, high up in a glacier, the paths of the two policemen are joined in the search for their killers, a trail that embroils them in the mysterious cult of the blood red rivers.

About this title

Review

A corpse, hideously tortured and mutilated, is discovered in the French Alps; a primary school in the Perigord region suffers a professional break-in, except that nothing is stolen. What is the connection between these two events, the one appalling and pathologically vicious, the other seemingly innocuous and trivial?

Superintendent Pierre Niemans, posted away from Paris after brutalising an English football fan, is assigned to the murder; Police Lieutenant Karim Abdouf, a second-generation French Arab and consigned to small-town duties, is given the responsibility for the non-theft. As the two narratives alternate and converge, Niemans is led to discover more disfigured bodies--the killer is planting clues which point to each corpse - and Abdouf is drawn into the mystery of a child, dead for many years, of whom all written and photographic traces seem to have been eradicated.

Jean-Cristophe Grange's second novel was a huge success in France, where critics compared the book to The Silence of the Lambs. While not quite matching Thomas Harris's forensic expertise or brilliantly depicted psychopathology, Blood-Red Rivers is a gripping narrative: the action occurs within a 24-hour span, and gathers a vertiginous pace towards the end as the two detectives find that they are both investigating the same crime--one that goes far beyond what either could possibly have imagined. This French thriller replaces the characteristic small town setting of the American crime novel with the equal claustrophobia of the small French university town--the undercurrents of racism and the class divisions of French society providing a festering background for the horrors of the book's climax. All in all, not so much A Year In Provence but twenty-four hours in Alpine hell.--Burhan Tufail

Review

"An enthralling read" (New Statesman)

"A gripping story and racy narrative" (Sunday Telegraph)

"The best thriller since The Silence of the Lambs" (Figaro)

"Grange has turned out a rip-roaring shocker that begins smashingly; skirts the spooky supernatural amid graveyards, ruins, wild landscapes and night-scapes for 300 gripping pages; and at last collapses into the macabre 18th century fantasies of Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe" (Eugen Weber Los Angeles Times)

"Smart and intense, Blood Red Rivers will have you turning pages at a furious clip" (Peter Mergendahl Denver Rocky Mountain News)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099449021
• ISBN 13: 9780099449027
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336