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Chief Superintendent Jean Baptiste Adamsberg is about to take off for a training course in DNA profiling run by the Mounties in Canada when he reads of a strangely familiar crime. A young woman in Alsace has just been found murdered, with three wounds in her abdomen. A vagrant has been charged with the crime, though he denies either knowledge or recollection of it. Almost 30 years ago, Adamsberg's elder brother, Raphael, had been accused of an identical crime and, rather than face a trial that would have surely resulted in a conviction, he disappeared with the help of his brother and has not been heard of since. Adamsberg is quite sure he knows who the serial killer is a powerful retired judge who used his position and influence to avoid suspicion. But the judge died 16 years ago, just as Adamsberg had almost enough evidence to arrest him. Surely even Adamsberg cannot believe that a dead judge, who would now be over 90 were he still alive, could be responsible for the Alsace murder. Well, yes, he does. Once in Canada, Adamsberg, like his brother before him, finds himself accused of murdering a young woman by inflicting three wounds to her abdomen. Is there a copycat killer on the loose? Or has his fruitless obsession with bringing the judge to justice finally sent Adamsberg over the edge and made him kill without recalling the deed? Solving the crimes involves events that require a very substantial suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, even one familiar with the eccentricities of a Vargas novel. When this novel first appeared a couple of years ago in French, it was roundly criticized in Quebec for its treatment of the landscape, language, and customs of that province. An author's note assures us that the RCMP headquarters in Hull is an invention, but Vargas would have been better served to remind her readers that all the Quebec material is purest fantasy. Bears do not infest the outskirts of Hull, clinging to the beech trees; the roads are actually paved and ploughed, and Quebeckers do not, as a rule, regard the 90 km/hour speed limit with anything but sublime indifference. The element of the original text that most exercised French Quebeckers does not come across in the translation; even Siān Reynolds, brilliant translator though she is, could not find a way of rendering the quaint, archaic French with which Vargas endows her local characters. On the other hand, Vargas's Quebec is no more fantastical than is her Paris or her representation of French police procedure. Her approach to crime is intellectual and witty, even literary. But no one should be foolish enough to imagine that it is rooted in any recognizable reality.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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