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When a book comes along with rave reviews and a prestigious award attached, I tend to feel I’m almost obligated to love it. But that didn’t work in this case. (In reality, it’s never a sure thing.) The French thriller, Alex, by Pierre Lemaitre, tells the tale in alternating chapters of a beautiful young woman kidnapped on the streets of Paris and the brilliant police commandant who sets out to find her. However, the novel is a lot more than a straightforward police procedural that ends in a successful, last-minute release of the battered captive. Instead, it’s a story of several extremely unusual people with over-the-top behavior that you or I are unlikely ever to encounter in the real world.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Alex, the kidnapped young woman who gives her name to the title, is a piece of work, and I do not mean this as a compliment. Just how much of a piece of work becomes clear as the story unfolds. The police commandant, Camille Verhoeven, is just as strange. The author repeatedly refers to him as a dwarf, although his height, four feet eleven, is at the outside limit of the definition.

A volcanic temper ill suited for a senior police officer

Tormented as a youngster, Verhoeven carries with him all the baggage of resentment, including a volcanic temper and a combativeness that’s ill suited for a senior police officer. His sidekicks, Armand and Louis, are both cartoon-like as well. Armand “borrows” everything in sight, never paying for a thing himself. Louis is wealthy and appears to have two or three PhDs, since he is prone to launch into a lengthy discourse at the drop of an obscure fact.

I’ll say this much for Alex: the book held my attention to the last. I might add that the snippet from the Daily Mail review that appears on the cover — “Diabolical!” — is most certainly true.

Alex: The Commandant Camille Verhoeven Trilogy by Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne ★★★☆☆

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