PrintReviews

The Cemetery of Swallows by Mallock

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Translated by Steven Rendall — Don’t you just love novels which begin with a nearly impossible set-up… and somehow find a way of resolving it? Set-ups don’t get much more implausible than this. Manuel Gemoni, a fairly well-adjusted young Frenchman with a charming wife and…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Lying-Down Room by Anna Jaquiery

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The Lying Down Room introduces us to the charismatic and dedicated Chief Inspector Serge Morel. The story opens in Paris in the stifling August heat, and Morel is called to examine a disturbing crime scene. An elderly woman has been brutally murdered to the soundtrack…
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Book Club

The Dark Angel

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Paris. The present day. A bureau de change is robbed by a quartet of villains from a run down banlieue défavorisée. When the girlfriend of one of the crooks is brutally murdered, Lieutenant Jerome Barthelmy from the 10th arrondisement police becomes involved. His efforts to…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas

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Translated by Sian Reynolds — A four-time winner of the CWA International Dagger, Fred Vargas is arguably France’s finest contemporary crime writer. With every book, you enter a familiar fictional landscape that is not quite reality but rather a uniquely Gallic mélange of the whimsical,…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Irène

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Written by Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne — The first Pierre Lemaitre book to be translated into English, Alex, was one of my top reads of 2013 and a deserving joint winner of the CWA International Dagger. It shared the award with the Ghost…
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