Translated by Nick Caistor — Here at Crime Fiction Lover we have been impressed by Olivier Norek’s Capitaine Victor Coste series and we know that our readers have been enjoying Everybody Lies, the French television series he writes. Moving beyond Coste and the show, Surface is his new standalone and the perfect starting point if you’re new to the author, whose authentic storytelling is rooted in his service as a police captain in Paris’s notorious Seine-Saint-Denis district prior to becoming a writer.
After eight years in the Paris drug squad, Captain Noémie Chastain is left almost unrecognisable – disfigured during a dawn drug raid in a Parisian suburb. The shotgun blast left her not just physically scarred, but mentally and emotionally too. As if the trauma of the incident and her recovery process are not enough, Adriel, her lover and colleague, abandons her because he can’t cope with her scarred face.
Chastain is posted to remote Decazeville in the southern Aveyron district to evaluate the local police branch and justify its closure. There are ulterior motives behind her forced transfer: her boss wants to get rid of her, claiming that her appearance will have a negative impact on team morale. The real reasons are that her face will be a constant reminder of the danger of their profession and they don’t trust her to be capable of doing her job anymore.
Regular crime fiction readers know that whenever a recuperating cop arrives in a small rural village, a suspicious death is on the way. The gruesome discovery of a child’s body in the dam at a hydroelectric plant dam raises questions about the disappearance of three other children during its construction in 1994. When the old town was flooded to build the dam, a replica of it was built a few kilometres away. Now the water is being drained and 20 years of secrets will be exposed.
Chastain has a new team and new challenges. Commandant Roze, head of the police department, is on the brink of retirement and puts Chastain in charge of the investigation. The outspoken Bousquet talks behind her back and questions her every decision, while the naive constable Bambi leaks confidential information to his mother – the town’s unofficial news channel. The sharpest member of the team, Lieutenant Romain Valant, wrestles with personal problems. His father, the mayor, is an opportunist and racist who opposes his son’s mixed-race family. Racism and institutional corruption are alive and well in rural France.
Setting and atmosphere always play important roles in Norek’s books. Unlike his Banlieue trilogy featuring Capitaine Victor Coste as protagonist, Surface is set in a declining rural community with no future, rather than Paris. This creates an oppressive sense of small-town claustrophobia. The balance between plotline, action and character development is also finer and more nuanced here, as though Norek deliberately chose a slightly slower and more suspenseful approach.
The term le polar, short for roman policier, initially referred to noir crime fiction characterised by hardboiled detectives, a corrupt legal system and a cynical worldview. Where traditional whodunnits by the likes of Georges Simenon focused on the murder mystery element, polars focus more on characters’ psychological issues, urban conflict in cities like Marseille, and commentary on relevant issues like violence, racism and immigration. Today, the polar tradition is continued by writers like Michel Bussi, Fred Vargas, Guillaume Musso and, of course, Olivier Norek.
Surface has all the requirements of a traditional le polar: Chastain is an obstinate and meticulous woman who doesn’t back down. She trusts no one, with the exception of Melchior, her psychologist, and Picasso, an abused dog she rescued who has physical scars of his own. She fights against the injustice of the police system and tries to get a grip on a seemingly impossible-to-solve murder investigation. She is still recovering physically and psychologically, occasionally suffering lapses when she loses control. Despite featuring a stereotypically vengeful and tormented character, Norek delivers a riveting crime thriller.
Open Borders Press
Print/Kindle
£15.84
CFL Rating: 5 Stars