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If someone read only the 2 last books in the series that person couldn't possibly figure how the same author could write 2 books so different in tone and quality of writing. In this last work Tana French gives a new meaning to psychological thriller. She looks at every situation from all possible angles, examines in depth the consequences of each line of thought and very soon the reader finds him/herself in what feels like those mirror labyrinths not knowing who's who and who did what. Allow me a quote just to give you a taste: "That feeling, it’s not some bullshit figure of speech. It lives inside you somewhere deeper and older and more real than anything else except sex, and when it comes rising it takes your whole body for its own. It’s a smell of blood raging at the back of your nose, it’s your arm muscle throbbing to let go the bowstring, it’s drums speeding in your ears and a victory roar building at the bottom of your gut. I let myself love that feeling, one last time. I let myself drink it down, cram every second of it deep into me, lay away my store of it to last me the rest of my life." Well done!

Desole pour le manque d'accents, mon clavier n'en a pas.

J'ai longtemps hesite avant de lire ce classique car je connaissais l'antisemitisme passione de l'auteur. En general les extremistes en toutes choses ont un discours qui m'ennui tres vite. Ils repetent toujours la meme chose de maniere similaire ou differente mais toujours la meme chose. Je me suis enfin resolu a le lire pour me rendre compte que ce que je craignais se realisait: en gros on peut resumer les quelques 400 pages par ces mots: chienne de vie, nous sommes des vers pourris sur une terre pourrie. Ce sont mes mots mais je crois que je traduis assez fidelement le message de l'auteur. Il a bien sur son stlyle a lui et fait souvent de bonnes trouvailles mais la repetition incessante rend la lecture lassante. N'allez pas m'assassiner pour la comparaison mais il m'a fait penser a La Putain de Nelly Arcan. Toujours la meme hargne repetee sans repit.

Read this book because I'm just back from Buenos Aires which totally charmed me and where the action of this novel is located.

A thriller a la A.E.Poe the goal is to find who murdered one of the participants to a Poe convention that has been moved at the last minute to Buenos Aires.

Allow me to quote to give you a better idea of the tone: "And you told us what the story would be like if you had written it. Urquiza was to kill Johnson. Urquiza was to invoke the powerful beings from the South, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, and to be the embodiment of Hastur, the destroyer, he who walks in the wind, so as to prevent Johnson from revealing even more than he already had, quite innocently, revealed of the language of the Necronomicon and of the secret code concealed in Poe’s literature. Everything had been set up with that end in mind. The conference was moved to Buenos Aires in order to bring Johnson to the South, where Urquiza would invoke the powers of Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth as well as Hastur’s lethal skill with “the slicer” to eliminate him without leaving any traces..." As you can see Poe is not very far but diverted by Jorge Borges and the result makes for a light but nevertheless interesting reading. Maybe I'm still under the spell of this beautiful city...?

You're probably too young to remember painting by numbers. Basically when you bought that, you got a board on which you found the outline of what was being painted in (a tiger, a house, etc) and this outline was filled with small numbered areas. You applied paint #1 to the areas numbered 1, 2 to the 2s and the final result was a beautiful tiger in full colour which you could then show to your friends pretending you painted that. This novel by Follett reminds me exactly of that. It seems to be written by Mr Follett following a pretty exact recipe on how to write a spy novel. You have to hang in during the first 75% because not much exciting happens. Things get a bit more lively towards the end but by then I had mostly lost my patience. Nevertheless reading a work on a possible scenario leading to nuclear war is a bit too close to home in these troubles times.