Fred Vargas, Qiu Xiaolong and Arturo Pérez-Reverte: the books not to be missed

On the slab

By Fred Vargas.

Flammarion, 512 pages, €23.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

Those who love me will read my On the slab… This is what Fred Vargas could say, by pastiche of Patrice Chéreau, to his faithful readers about his latest work. They will find (re) there everything that makes the singularity and the salt of the novelist’s thrillers since her first successes. After an absence of several years, she reconnects with Adamsberg, her recurring hero, nonchalant and oh so endearing curator. As well as with its secondary characters with eccentric characters and its intrigues impregnated with legends and mysteries. This time, she transports her little world to Ille-et-Vilaine, a few kilometers from the Château de Combourg, where Chateaubriand lived. Adamsberg meets there in particular an original and generous innkeeper and a certain Josselin de Chateaubriand, the spitting image of the illustrious poet, threatened by a fellow citizen, whom he will work to protect while a series of murders occurs.

The plot takes a particularly Vargasian turn when it comes to a fertilized egg – the detail is notable – left near the corpses and flea bites, two clues that point to the culprit. True fans will find the novelist’s own tone and slowness. Its indolent curator sits for long periods on dolmens to reflect, get out of the blur – “I don’t know” is his catchphrase – and propose a solution to this curious enigma. On the other hand, less regular readers may find the plot too complex and the number of wacky characters a bit high to completely abandon themselves to the pleasure of Fred Vargas’ previous novel featuring Adamsberg, When the recluse comes out. Agnes Laurent

Love, Murder and the Pandemic

By Qiu Xiaolong, trans. from English (United States) by Françoise Bouillot.

Liana Levi, 224 pages, €20.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

For years Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese novelist living in the United States since the events of Tian’anmen, has been using Inspector Chen, his hero, to paint an uncompromising portrait of China. Pollution, increasingly close surveillance of citizens, real estate speculation, he explored many of the failings of the regime. In his latest novel, his gaze is even sharper since the plot takes place during the long months which saw the development of the Covid epidemic in China and the establishment of the official policy of “zero Covid”.

Less than the police enigma, reduced to almost nothing, the book is fascinating for what it tells about the harshness of the period. Inspector Chen is in Shanghai, a little on the sidelines, he discovers the extent of the control exercised by the power, determined to show its superiority over the West in the fight against the virus, and the absurdity of the system. To be admitted to the hospital, it is necessary, for example, to show a negative test of less than twenty-four hours. He, who is no longer very much in court, discovers that each citizen is tracked using the QR code on his phone. If he goes on alert because a citizen has met a Covid patient in the street, it is almost no longer possible to leave his home. But is it really a question of health or control of opponents? Because in Wuhan, the city where the epidemic started and has been put under cover by the authorities, some want to testify to the horrors committed. Inspector Chen, an English translator in his spare time, chooses to help them. Less poetic, less gourmet than the previous episodes, the last Qiu Xiaolong deserves at least to be read as a testimony. AL

sidi

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte, trans. from Spanish by Gabriel Iaculli.

Threshold, 354 pages, €21.90.

Express rating: 5/5

It all starts with a hunt in a semi-desert country. About forty horsemen smelling of “sweat, dirt, manure, greased leather and metal weapons” track a band of Moors who have come to raid this region known as the “border”. We are in the 11th century, in a Spain fragmented between Christian kingdoms and Moorish taifas, and the man who rides at the head of the troop is a mercenary called Ruy Diaz. He will go down in legend under the name of Cid, of Sidi, in Arabic, the master. The character could only fit like a glove to Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who always knew how to resuscitate with consummate skill the narration of the pages of his country’s history, of the 17th century empire (the saga of Captain Alatriste) at the beginning of the Franco era (falco).

Weapons, clothes, attitudes, he surpasses himself here in precision, brings to life a world where rooster crows or the number of Creeds take the place of temporal markers. But more than an era and its complex political balances, it is the inner mechanisms of beings that interest Pérez-Reverte. “You are one of those rare men who are faithful not to a person, but to an idea. […]the one you have of yourself”, declares to Ruy Diaz the Moorish king of Zaragoza, bringing to light this theme so recurrent in the author. Who has no equal in making doubts and tension felt, those soldiers as lords, when the hour of battle approaches and the pulses of the most experienced quicken, in unison with that of the reader. Bertrand Bouard