Find the best price forThe Phantom of Rue Royal (Nicolas Le Floch, #3)

Jean-François Parot, Howard Curtis

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Paperback, Published in Nov 2014 by Gallic Books

ISBN10: 190604015X | ISBN13: 9781906040154

Page count: 368

Jean-François Parot’s The Phantom of Rue Royale is further proof (if proof were needed) that his splendid series of historical crime novels featuring Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch is one of the most cherishable phenomena on the current crime fiction scene (particularly when sympathetically translated, as this latest novel is by Howard Curtis).

Paris has been thrown into mourning after a fireworks display for the Dauphin’s marriage to Marie Antoinette has been disastrously mismanaged, and a conflagration has led to panicking crowds and carnage. Hundreds of people have been injured in the mêlée, and many have been crushed to death. Watching the conflagration (at first, from a distance) is the youthful Commissioner le Floch, who has already calculated that things have been badly planned, and attempts (in vain) to aid the victims of the catastrophe. But one of the deaths on that fateful evening has nothing to do with the fireworks: a young woman has been found strangled amongst the many other corpses. Nicolas is given the assignment of tracking down just how the young woman died, but he has, in fact, another agenda -- one that involves nothing less than corruption and skulduggery in the upper echelons of state power.

All of this is handled with the assurance that we have come to expect from Jean-François Parot after the delights of such books as The Châtelet Apprentice and The Man with The Lead Stomach, and Nicolas is a highly unusual protagonist; it's a refreshing touch that he has an element of self-importance – an element that is being constantly undercut by the grim reality of the situations he finds himself in. We know of course, how adroit Parot is at the handling of historical detail, but there will are those who will find that the supernatural element which assumes such importance in the later stages of the book is less convincingly handled. Nevertheless, The Phantom of Rue Royale is not to be missed. --Barry Forshaw