Fabulous! I leave the reading of "Debout les morts", more than ever a fan Fred Vargas is really, like it or not, the queen of the thriller. She knows how to make his plot an octopus that takes you between its tentacles as you have not digested his preposterous story, like its characters as singular as each other and are emblematic of the universe vargasien ( if you allow me this neologism). No way out of the story. Even when temporarily loose the book, one remains on the streets of Chasles in the dilapidated house that sounds sweet and endearing madness Clan Vandoosler. In this novel, the tribe constitutes and gathers in this place where, in the following novels, Kehlweiler will seek to assist in its investigations, a tribe of four extravagant characters. There was first Matthias, the hunter-gatherer, the Neolithic specialist "who continues auroch to exhaustion and his tribe fled rather than return empty-handed"; Then there was Mark, specializing in the Middle Ages, "which pushes the chatter up the art of lacemaking"; then comes Lucien, the specialist of the Great War 14-18. Matthias (Matthew), Marc Lucien (Luke), their nickname will be quickly found: the Evangelists. These three are as different as the periods of history to which they dedicate themselves but they are made for each other, or at least to complete. "So concludes Marc .... when our divisions will be too difficult and time irreconcilable differences there will only make fire. Is that right? It may help, Lucien admitted. Wise program, said Matthias. "Finally, there is the old Vandoosler, the godfather of Mark, a retired police officer who does nothing like the others and that imperceptibly but surely will lead somehow this curious crew down from his fourth floor and experience atypical cop. "Surrounded in my old age by evangelists. And where is the fourth, right? Nowhere. That's what it is ... A car with three wheels, a cart with three horses. Really funny. Funny, because it poured into the ditch? Marc asked, annoyed. No, says Vandoosler. Because it does not go where we want. Unpredictable so. "And it is true that this strange quartet works so rickety first sight, seemingly anarchic but in the end, like a well-oiled machine. The story, presented succinctly, may appear as crazy as the characters that animate. The neighbors, first. On each side of the shack where the clan Vandoosler found refuge, there is a house with a peculiar neighbor. Left, First, "on the Western Front," as named Lucien, there Simonéidis Sophia, a former opera singer decked out in her strange husband, Pierre Relivaux. On the eastern front, there Matthias falls in love with Juliet, which runs a small restaurant "The Barrel" where the clan will meet frequently. It houses his brother destitute. The plot then. One morning, Sophia noticed that a tree was planted in his garden, without her knowing by whom. A beech. Everything begins there. What came to this young beech in the garden? The Vandoosler clan gets involved, without finding an answer. Shortly later, Sophia disappears and found an unrecognizable body in a burned car. Is it his? Meanwhile, Alexandra occurs, the niece of Sophia Juliet will host with her toddler five. Marc has a crush on her. Also comes out of nowhere, a curious character who Sophia research. Everyone is mobilized to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of Sophia and to solve the mystery of the calcined body. Throughout the plot, the suspects multiply. Hank is complex and, whenever the Evangelists pull on a wire, the skein appears to complicate a little more. But priority is law: we must protect Alexandra appears to be the main suspect. Vandoosler will reactivate a former colleague Leguennec, which will handle the investigation. He will handle him and his Evangelists, to better come to grips with this matter as incredible as captivating and whose outcome occurs only a few pages before the end, as unexpected as logic. We then see that the son of the skein had been so cleverly woven a host of clues could have put us on track if a whole had been scrambled with a rare talent. Indeed, as in most novels by Fred Vargas, was at times the feeling that the author we walk, we tangled in a background of psycho-historical-philosophical and sociological considerations rather lose us. We experienced pleasurable digressions but we did not see the strings that could have put us on the path of the solution. Then we hang up anyway over the plot. We arrive at the end, exhausted wellness, happy to finally approach a truth that has known her a thousand times without seeing and which, when discovered, seems bright. A must read to spend a great moment of literary happiness.
