Highly informed and stylized, Hortense Is Abducted is a madcap dissection of the detective genre featuring characters Roubaud developed in an earlier novel Our Beautiful Heroine, one which I haven't read. This is all out Oulipo, games and maths subvert the story and any sources of sentiment. The crime is solved via math, based on the sequence of characters appearing in the text. There are nods and plaudits all around. I did appreciate the effort, the scintillating architecture even if the sighs eventually defeated the laughter. ( )