The Phantom of Rue Royale: The Nicolas Le Floch Investigations 3: Nicolas Le Floch Investigation #3 (Nicolas le Floch Investigates) - Softcover

Jean-François Parot; Howard Curtis (Translator)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190604015X ISBN 13: 9781906040154

Publisher: Gallic Books, 2009

Synopsis

Paris is in mourning. At the firework display marking the Dauphin's marriage to Marie Antoinette, hundreds of people have been injured or crushed to death. Yet not all the victims died accidentally... The tragic incident on Place Louis XV yields a new case for Commissioner Le Floch when a strangled woman is found amongst the other corpses. The investigation takes him to the home of a furrier on Rue Royale where he must deal not just with its curious residents but also face the terrifying forces of the supernatural.

About this title

Review

Jean-François Parot’s The Phantom of Rue Royale is further proof (if proof were needed) that his splendid series of historical crime novels featuring Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch is one of the most cherishable phenomena on the current crime fiction scene (particularly when sympathetically translated, as this latest novel is by Howard Curtis).

Paris has been thrown into mourning after a fireworks display for the Dauphin’s marriage to Marie Antoinette has been disastrously mismanaged, and a conflagration has led to panicking crowds and carnage. Hundreds of people have been injured in the mêlée, and many have been crushed to death. Watching the conflagration (at first, from a distance) is the youthful Commissioner le Floch, who has already calculated that things have been badly planned, and attempts (in vain) to aid the victims of the catastrophe. But one of the deaths on that fateful evening has nothing to do with the fireworks: a young woman has been found strangled amongst the many other corpses. Nicolas is given the assignment of tracking down just how the young woman died, but he has, in fact, another agenda -- one that involves nothing less than corruption and skulduggery in the upper echelons of state power.

All of this is handled with the assurance that we have come to expect from Jean-François Parot after the delights of such books as The Châtelet Apprentice and The Man with The Lead Stomach, and Nicolas is a highly unusual protagonist; it's a refreshing touch that he has an element of self-importance – an element that is being constantly undercut by the grim reality of the situations he finds himself in. We know of course, how adroit Parot is at the handling of historical detail, but there will are those who will find that the supernatural element which assumes such importance in the later stages of the book is less convincingly handled. Nevertheless, The Phantom of Rue Royale is not to be missed. --Barry Forshaw

Review

The Chatelet Apprentice is a terrific debut... a novel that brilliantly evokes the casual brutality of life in eighteenth-century France. --Sunday Times

Reads like a cross between a Maigret mystery and Les Liaisons Dangereuses --Mail on Sunday

An engaging murder mystery that picks away at the delicate power balance between king, police and state. --Financial Times

Reads like a cross between a Maigret mystery and Les Liaisons Dangereuses --Mail on Sunday

An engaging murder mystery that picks away at the delicate power balance between king, police and state. --Financial Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallic Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 190604015X
• ISBN 13: 9781906040154
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368