Lead Review

• Book: Hysteria
• Location: Paris
• Author: LJ Ross

Review Author: Tina Hartas

The author LJ Ross’ work is synonymous with Northumberland and Tyneside, where she sets her DCI Ryan mysteries. Hysteria is the second outing for Dr Alexander Gregory, an elite forensic psychiatrist and criminal profiler and this time she has him heading for Paris.

He happens to be attending a conference in the city, which coincides with Paris Fashion Week. He is hoping for a bit of sightseeing after his commitments have been executed but he is asked to attend the scene of a sadistic knife attack on a model in the Hotel Violette. Comely Camille has been left without speech and he must determine whether she can’t or whether she won’t speak. However, Camille seems to have secrets of her own…..

Gregory is a careful, perceptive and methodical man when he is working on his investigations. In his personal life, however, he is a tormented soul and he can often find himself distracted by issues from his childhood that can overwhelm him – invariably in his dreams. His early years’ experiences have conditioned him to believe that he cannot rely on others, his work is his be-all and end-all. His head and his heart are often in conflict and he really struggles with the split nature of his emotional personality.

There is quite a lot of French woven into the narrative, which has been included presumably to give the story a fulsome flavour of France and lend authenticity to location. I note some reviewers have been put off by what they feel to be over-use of the foreign language. I think it is an incredibly tricky aspect to get the balance just right, so that smatterings of a foreign language appeal to people both more confident in a foreign language and to those who perhaps have never had the opportunity to experiment with languages – it is a very broad brush. In this instance you are presented with the French, and actually – mostly – a translation for the longer sentences is woven into the next piece of text; or the subsequent actions by the characters indicate the meaning. I studied French, so I was reasonably comfortable with the use in this book but perhaps I might have had a different response if the language had been unfamiliar to me, perhaps like Hungarian or Chinese (neither of which are familiar). The level of use, here, did teeter on being an alienating device. It’s such a difficult call for an author to get this just right. It is also important to ensure that, when using a foreign language (in this instance French), that it is correct and authentic throughout (which it isn’t at times in this book – the accents, for example, had a whale of a time ).

Paris makes its presence felt. The characters pass by iconic monuments and indeed the charred remains of Notre Dame feature. There is soul searching in clubs and trips to Petite Asie (where Gregory has his palm read, confirming his torment). As it says in the book’s summary: Murder and mystery are peppered with dark humour in this fast-paced thriller set amidst the spectacular Parisian landscape.

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