A Fillette in France (Paris)

• Book: Alex
• Location: France, Paris
• Author: Pierre Lemaitre

Review Author: tripfiction

Where to start without giving away the plot? An ingenious if at times incroyable plot bowls along at a very good pace, pulling the reader this way and that. And despite the twists and turns, it is still easy to keep abreast of the storyline, as recaps and summaries are plentiful, without detracting from the flow.

Alex Prévost is a young woman who, one evening, is kidnapped from a Parisian street, just like that. There is minimal evidence of the crime, very few witnesses, the police are brought in to investigate. Yet no-one reports her as missing – whoever she is – and there are no real clues to her identity.

Three police officers arrive to oversee the enquiry, Camille, Louis and Armand, under the command of Divisionnaire Le Guen from the Brigade Criminelle. They have a long and varied history of working together and, in part, this is the backstory of their team, and how each responds to the situation, a good cop/bad cop (and a third cop) routine. There is a sense that the author is laying the foundations for a series of crime novels revolving around these three very different individuals, all with terrific French flair.

So, back to the plot. Alex is not quite who she seems and the book fairly early on introduces the reader to the concept of the Fillette, in which, we discover, Alex is imprisoned (without giving too much away) it is ‘an instrument of torture created under Louis XI for the Bishop of Verdun. He was kept in it for ten years. It’s a passive but very effective torture. The joints fuse, the muscles atrophy…and it drives the victim insane”. Add into the equation some rats (do not read this novel if you suffer from musophobia!) some sadistic acts that involve sulphuric acid down the line a good array of plausible characters and you have the perfect recipe for some truly gory sequences. Suffice it to say that justice prevails at the end.

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