Surface by Olivier Norek
French crime fiction
Original title: Surface
Translator: Nick Caistor
Source – Review copy
I don’t read many crime novels, but one crime motif I like is the fish-out-of-water. I love crime TV shows but don’t read many crime novels. Oliver Norek is one of France’s biggest Crime writers. He also has an interesting backstory: he was initially a humanitarian worker in Yugoslavia before becoming a police officer, so much of the book’s police procedural comes from his time in the force. His other books have been adapted into films, and this book, published in France seven years ago, is now a TV series that will air on the BBC at some point in the UK. I’m not sure which TV stations elsewhere will be showing this show.
“What about the eye?”
“Subconjunctival haemorrhaging stemmed. She’ll have peri-orbital bruising for several weeks. A black eye filled with blood, but nothing crucial as regards visioniẠạ
“Nose?”
“Broken by the blast. Operated.”
“Jaw?”
“Fracture of the ascending ramus of right mandible. We had to screw in three steel plates. There’s no way she’ll be able to speak any time soon. Fed intravenously for eight to ten days, then blended food and iced water for three weeksẠạ
“She certainly had a lucky escape.”
“Yes. Five centimetres to the left and her whole face would have been blown off. Even so, it’s not a pretty sight. In addition to the 60 stitches to restore her right cheek, every pellet will leave its mark. Well, anyway, the surgery has been a successful
The true nature of the horrific injury she has got
This book has a number of threads; the first is the main character’s story. Noémie is one of those police officers who, at the start of the book, seems to have it all. A job in a drugs team in Paris a loving boyfriend and is on the up. Then, on the flick of a coin, one raid goes wrong, and she is shot in the face and is left with a horrendous scar. This is the book’s turning point. Weeks later, when she feels well enough to return to work, she finds she is being sidelined because of how she looks. She is being sent to Aveyron a rural area mnorth west of Paris. She is instructed to assess the local force, as it is about to be disbanded and the area handed over to the Gendarmerie. Show that when she arrives, she is the outsider. But when a dead body appears in a local lake, it links back to a long-dead cold case involving the building of a local dam; her colleagues may know more, one of whom is the son of the powerful local mayor. Added to this are the chats between Noémie and her therapist as she copes with both how she looks, the loss of her job at Pairs Partner that left her after the injury and all that the new job brings.
Viviez-Decazeville railway station
The Aveyron
Only two other people got off. After seven hours, Noémie finally left the local train that had taken a thousand detours to stop at villages whose names she had never heard of and which she would probably never remember. The fact is that between Laroque-Bouillac, Boisse-Penchot and Lacapelle-Marival, you needed a good memory or to have broken down there.
No more Parisian skyscrapers: now there were woods and fields dotted with farmhouses. No more wide avenues, instead winding roads sometimes turning into dirt tracks that led to isolated houses.
Straw bales, tractors, horses. Paris had definitively disappeared.
And yet the stop at Viviez-Decazeville did not have the bucolic appearance of the previous halts.
The new job is really in the stick so to speak!
I like how this book flowed. For me, a crime book has to draw you in, and this does. But it also has layers: Noémie coping with what happened and its aftermath. The locals’ secret, buried and three dead children, stir up the past in a rural community. Then the sheer horror of losing everything is cpatured in the conversations between Noémie and her therapist. This also highlights how the French police is organised into two divisions: the Police and the Gendarmerie. This is what happens here, with the local police force eventually being handed over to the Gendarmerie. As I say, I like the fish-out-of-water style of crime story, from The Big Sleep to Poirot on the Orient Express or Marple in novels like Caribean story. To TV series like Death in Paradise. This book feels like it would work as a TV drama, with a strong main character and an interesting backstory. The locals with their secrets, then a cold case, all make for skeletons in the cupboard.Do you have a favourite type of crime novel, and have you read any other books from Norek?
