Wedged in an isolated crevice on a rock face outside a university town in the French Alps, a mutilated and naked corpse has been discovered. Pierre Niemans, the ex-golden boy of the commando squad, a brilliant detective but prone to uncontrollable fits of temper, is sent from Paris to investigate.Meanwhile, in a small town in rural France, Karim Abdouf, another maverick policeman who was once a poor Arab boy from the backstreets of Nanterre, is trying to find out why the tomb of a child in the local cemetery should have been desecrated.When another body is found high up in a glacier, the paths of these two highly unconventional policemen are uncannily joined. Are they confronted by the operations of a satanic sect or by a gang of crazed killers? Or do the hints of genetic manipulation point to an even more macabre form of vengeance?Set in a translucent world of knife-edge glaciers, and with a cast of mysteriously ambiguous characters, Blood-red Rivers is packed with suspense that is brilliantly sustained throughout.
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
