This was Fred Vargas's first novel, published five years before the first Adamsberg story. Not quite what you might expect: it's a story about a struggling young artist who gets mixed up in a murder mystery whilst stalking a more famous painter he hopes can help him with his career. The viewpoint is shared roughly equally between him and the policeman investigating the murder, but we keep our distance from both of them. With the lack of any explicit love interest - but plenty of submerged homosocial tensions -, the stalking plot, men who cry, and a strictly amoral narrative voice, it's no surprise that the main character is called Tom: this has Ms Highsmith's Texan bootprints all over it. Which is not a bad thing in itself - it works well, and I'm tempted to say that it's a better Highsmith-pastiche than some of Highsmith's own novels - but it is a disappointment not to find much sign of Vargas's interest in the absurdity of life and the morality of crime that makes the Adamsberg novels so quirky and original. ( )

Not translated into English. This is Vargas first published novel and it shows a little but it has all the "good" stuff of Vargas subsequent novels too. We have Tom a wannabe artist who is more of a bum than anything else who wants to make it big in the art scene. He plans to hit for support the one big artist in Paris, Gaylor at one of his posh invitation only reception. Tom finds an old friend of Gaylor to take him to the reception where the old friend meets with an untimely death. The body is, of course, discovered by Tom who makes all the wrong moves, gets into all kind of troubles, get a few of his friends in deadly troubles. All wells that ends well in pure Vargas fashion. All the clues are there but they all seem so dull and not significant that you pass over them and don't notice. ( )

premier essai de Fred Vargas, ( )