The human being can end up being a more ruthless beast than any of the worst real or imagined beasts.
Martin Servaz approaches his new case with that perspective of the macabre of the murderer capable of beheading a horse in a rugged area of the French Pyrenees.
The cruel way of eliminating an animal cannot be a gratuitous action. There is something ominous, an aspect of an atavistic death ceremony that seems to anticipate a repercussion on other levels, like a sudden storm that plunged from the mountain peaks into the deep valley.
Martin is a type gifted for that deductive capacity that goes beyond the mere discovery of the bloody discovery.
In a tangential meeting, Martin discovers Diane Berg, a brand new psychologist at the psychiatric hospital located in the same area where her research should be carried out.
Between them they will discover a strange telluric force that may be ruling with sinister will over the inhabitants of that space between ancient mountains and silent forests.
Because beyond that life is hard in those parts. Nothing justifies that common sullen character to the sinister.
The worst of all is that the people of the place, among whom are or find the minds or twisted minds capable of decapitation of the animal, seem to understand a lot of symbols, enigmas, mysteries of the area, of silenced secrets that they keep , under the snow, the promises of spring or the bones of other victims.
There is a special harmony between landscape and characters, between setting and personalities, a terrifying conspiracy so that, as a reader, you discover in each inhabitant of those mountains a thread of suspicion that seems to invite you to the deepest terror, the one that evokes the essence of the human being as belonging in origin to other dark times where survival was a matter of norms born of obscurantism and old beliefs.
Anyone else would abandon the idea of getting anything clear, but Martin will try to unearth the greatest secrets of that valley.
You can now buy the novel Under the ice (Glacé), the new book of Bernard minier, here: