We hadn’t heard from Dennis Lehane since 2017 and his rather wonky thriller, “After the fall”. The American writer is back with “The Silence”, and finds the best of his vein combining social and suspense. Without being as exceptional as “Mystic River” or “A country at dawn”, this new novel knows how to embark on a story that is both terribly moving and always intriguing. In 1974, in Boston, the hometown of the author whose present and past he has never ceased to explore, a single mother, a white woman from a working class background, goes in search of her 17-year-old daughter, who has disappeared – is there a connection? – after the death of a young black man in a subway station. At the same time, the project of transferring students from different neighborhoods by bus is supposed to fight against racism. Lehane weaves her web, without flashes, as close as possible to memorable characters, made of flesh and blood. And we let ourselves be taken in, with complete confidence (Gallmeister, translated by François Happe, 446 pages, €25.40).
Beer and prostitution
In France, Marin Ledun has become a master of political thrillers. In “Their soul to the devil”, his great work denouncing the tobacco industry, he showed absolute mastery of the story, basing himself on an in-depth investigation to go towards the most thrilling romance. Same approach and same success with “Free Queens”, in which several characters – a journalist, activists, an honest policeman – attack the Nigerian prostitution industry, an objective ally of the beer trade, in a country plagued by corruption. Breathtaking (Gallimard, “Black Series”, 404 pages, €21).
If it is quite rarely translated in France, the Russian thriller has fascinating things to tell us about his country. In “And Suddenly the Hunter Came Out of the Woods”, Yulia Yakovleva tells us about the life of a policeman and his team in Leningrad in the 1930s. As murders are carefully staged, paintings are stolen from the Hermitage Museum. At the same time, the investigator, too honest and independent to be a good Soviet, is in the crosshairs of the political police. Never neglecting the twists specific to the genre, the author also knows how to evoke the small miseries of a “revolutionary” existence of an absolute grayishness (translated by Mireille Broudeur-Kogan, Actes Sud, “Actes noirs”, 458 pages, 24.50 €).
2023-07-23 03:07:00
#Boston #Leningrad #thrillers #summer
