Blood-Red Rivers - Softcover

Grange, Jean-Christophe

4.18

9,866 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860466605 ISBN 13: 9781860466601

Publisher: Harvill Press, 1999

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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 Ni�mans 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.

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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:

"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 The Los Angeles Times)

"I would defy any reader not to be on the edge of his seat." (Simon Shaw The Mail on Sunday)

"At 3 a.m. I crept into my bed completely unnerved: "Blood-RedRivers" turned out to be one of those compulsive reads, where you keep promising yourself you'll close the book after just one more chapter but find yourself helplessly turning pages until there are no more." (Lisa Oberteuffer The Albuquerque Journal)

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

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