Paris requiem

In September 1940, the reality of the German Occupation is taking hold in Paris, "the streets gray with uniforms and resignation." Eddie Giral, a French homicide detective, is walking a thin line between doing his work as a cop and pretending to serve his new masters. Then the murder of a jazz club owner in Montparnasse forces Eddie to rethink all his assumptions about staying alive in this odious new world. While investigating the case, he discovers that a group of convicts has disappeared from a Paris prison. Worse, this crew of hardened criminals seems to have formed a "gang of gangs" sanctioned by the Nazis and at the heart of a wide-ranging conspiracy that has brought together the Gestapo and the SD. Meanwhile, Eddie's efforts to help out two African American musicians, one of whom, Dominique, is a former lover, could be derailed if he doesn't up his level of cooperation with the enemy. "You're not a bad man, Eddie. You just sometimes forget to be a good one," Dominique tells him. It's true, but as Lloyd makes clear in this superbly atmospheric thriller, which oozes moral ambiguity, forgetting can be a necessary life skill. Just ask Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther, Eddie's world-weary equivalent on the streets of Berlin.

British author Lloyd makes his U.S. debut with a stellar sequel to 2020's The Unwanted Dead. In 1940 Nazi-occupied Paris, police detective Eddie Giral, a wise-cracking maverick determined to stay faithful to his responsibilities despite the risks to his life, investigates the death of a man found in a jazz club, who apparently had been trying to rob the safe. Giral gets several surprises at the scene: the victim is tied to a chair with twine, his lips sewn shut, and he's Julot le Bavard, a recidivist burglar who was supposed to be in prison. The autopsy confirms that someone suffocated le Bavard by sealing his mouth and holding his nostrils closed, leading Giral to focus on the reason for the bizarre murder method and an explanation for his premature release from incarceration. He pursues every theory, including whether the Gestapo killed le Bavard. Little details, such as the occupied city now being governed by German time, which runs an hour ahead of French time, bring the period to life. Admirers of J. Robert Jane's St-Cyr and Kohler series will be delighted. (Feb.)