If it weren’t for Doudouche waiting for him…

Camille has finished up his reports he’s hanging around. And then there’s the girl, about whom they still know nothing. The magistrate, the weather, the investigation, nothing’s going right. No one saw the kidnapper and what’s more no one seems to be able to find out anything about the woman who was kidnapped. He has avoided cases like this for as long as he can, sods law then that the one he ends up heading is the most mysterious case they have had in some time, they have no clues at all. Step forward our Commandent, Camille Verhoeven, who is put on the case though he is far from happy about it as his wife was kidnapped and killed when pregnant several years ago.

But that is only shock and twist number one that Lemaitre has up his sleeve for you.įortunately someone does see what happens, though not very clearly and so the police are called in. In fact you start to think she might end up a crazy cat lady one day, that is until after her meal for one (in a fancy restaurant where she makes eyes at a stranger) when she gets kidnapped. She is also, it seems, somewhat of a loner, as she is on the way to take herself out for a meal, she temps where she can get work, she moves about not seeming to befriend anyone and seems very distant from her family. When we first meet ‘Alex’ she is in a shop in Paris trying on wigs and silly glasses, she’s a woman who feels she goes unnoticed and wants to change her look. (Sept.MacLehose Press, 2013, paperback, 354 pages, translated by Frank Wynne, kindly sent by the publisher Some unexpected plot twists will keep readers turning the pages. An irritant to his superiors but respected by his subordinates, Verhoeven uses his diminutive stature to unsettle witnesses and suspects while surprising them with his intelligence and wit. Meanwhile, Commandant Camille Verhoeven throws himself into the kidnapping investigation as a way to deal with his grief over his wife’s death, but he and his detectives have few clues to aid them in identifying Alex’s abductor.

Soon Alex finds herself trapped inside a wooden crate suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse. That night, after dining alone at a restaurant, Alex is accosted on the sidewalk by a man who, after discarding the wig he initially grabbed and seizing her by her real hair, throws her into a white van. Perhaps he’s just an admirer who wants to meet her, she thinks. At the outset of French author Lemaitre’s impressive American debut, the first in a trilogy, attractive 30-year-old Alex Prévost is shopping for wigs in a Paris shop when she spots a man waiting on the street who’s clearly been following her.

Alex by pierre lemaitre