The suspense is kept alive thanks to authors like Sandrine Destombes. Because it seems more tempting to write black novels fresh from the gutter than to delve into the plot of a good thriller. It must be up to the demand of the genre reader. Or perhaps it is more determination for the gimmicky of the writers themselves.
Be that as it may, a narrative set where everything is balanced is always better. On the one hand, deduction, the intellectual challenge to the reader. On the other hand, a gloomy point that can even be linked to that ominous part of the theatrical recreation of the crime or the darkness of the psyche of the psychopath on duty…. It's a matter of wanting to work hard.
And Sandrine works for it, she is a conscientious worker of her plots to end up presenting those holistic crime novels. For this, Sandrine will approach her argument from always novel aspects, fertile for surprise or bewilderment. Events around familiar spaces where the unexpected happens or the worst comes out of those who least expect it. Or also aspects of the underworld always overlooked that Sandrine recovers to reconvert it into a puzzle that appears tempting, novel ...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Sandrine Destombes
Madam b
Nothing like the crimes in B. Because everything in B is better for those who operate in the shadows of legality, whether to launder money or the still-hot bodies of propitious victims ...
Blanche Barjac has a peculiar job. She is a cleaner, but not just any cleaner. He is dedicated to cleaning crime scenes, places where someone has been killed. Clean computers, carpets, social media profiles and hide corpses as if nothing had happened. His clients are celebrities from the Paris underworld, individuals who highly value his efficiency, discretion and ability.
But everything changes when he receives the order of an all-powerful hitman who is nicknamed the Hound. Among the victim's belongings that she has to make disappear, Blanche finds a handkerchief, a garment that carries her until the day her mother committed suicide, twenty years ago.
Someone is watching her and trying to blackmail her, but Blanche still has to face a greater enigma, a secret that will shake her sanity. Looking into your own past you will learn that no matter how hard you wipe, some stains cannot be erased. And that each of our acts always has consequences.
The Lessage family's double secret
A novel that introduces us to that doubly closed setting about the familiar as a paradoxically calm and disturbing environment. The typical contrast between the town as a peaceful home and its capacity to house the most vicious shadows guides us in this story to new unsuspected limits.
Two times to locate that deforming mirror in which the truth is distorted and the most monstrous consciences about what could have happened are reflected. When evil is not confronted in due time, when the abominable thing is expected to simply disappear, in the end the opposite usually happens. And evil has a lot of patience...
On one side of the mirror we travel to more than twenty years ago. Piolenc faces the anxiety of the disappearance of two brothers, Soléne and Raphaël. Only Soléne could be found, with her dead body presented with the macabre theatricality of the most cruel monster. The girl in her white dress, pointing to that purity and innocence that the criminal himself recognizes, to the further delight of his despicable work.
Maybe it's the same. Or maybe it is a continuation of his diabolical legacy. The point is that in the peaceful summer of 2018, with the diffuse mists of that past that nobody wants to evoke, some children begin to disappear again. The investigation is rushed between two investigators cleverly introduced by the author, a police officer who is unaware of the previous case and another who may lead him to the abandoned tracks. Everything to try to find that link that can eliminate chance and determine the causality that links the past and the current.
Meanwhile, Piolenc looks into the abyss of becoming a cursed place. Perhaps chosen by the devil himself or simply sown, among his fields, by the seed of evil.
This time nothing can be left open. The lives of the new children cry out among the silence of a stunned town, while the voices of the past echo towards a sinister confusion.
Maximum tension around those childhoods stolen from life, the worst of the sensations for a place so in need of sowing hope among a memory assaulted by darkness. Only, whoever has the link between what happened on one side of the mirror and the other, is probably the one who needs the most that nothing is known.
The Crest Sisters
The most lurid of Destombes' novels finds a complete justification for so much violence in the very nature of the matter. Evil is repaid with evil. The worst and cruelest of revenge is the one that is allowed to cool, as they say, so that reason ends up submerging in the shadows of the murderer that he is preparing to carry out with complete treachery.
Second Lieutenant Benoit always dreamed of major missions, but never would have believed that his career in Crest's brigade could change overnight. Because a hit-and-run driver has a fatal accident. Because a girl was kidnapped in the car who is now in a coma. Because soon a dead man appears with his eyes removed and incisions on his forehead.
The case has become complicated and it is inevitable that the "Experts" of the judicial police will arrive from Paris; Benoit is chosen to serve as their liaison in the field investigation. However, a curse seems to have loomed over the place, as more mutilated corpses emerge and no one is sleeping peacefully. The least, the residents of the "priory", a refuge for women who have been victims of sexist violence.
Other recommended books by Sandrine Destombes
R
Considering reflexology as a sinister metaphor, the idea of feet from which to discover their owners takes on a unique dimension towards the discovery of the murderer, capable of proposing a dilemma like the one offered in this novel. Something for which his representation has been able to mature over many years with the most sickening meticulousness.
Sandrine Destombes delivers what is probably her most complex and perfect novel, with a devilishly addictive plot and a cast of formidably portrayed characters, from the secondary ones to the antagonists.
Seven feet, cut off and tied together, appear floating in the Seine River, near the headquarters of the French Judicial Police. An investigation team is quickly formed, led by Captain Martin Vaas.
The search for the bodies to which those feet belong leads to the reopening of cases from more than twenty years ago, crimes in which the corpse was missing a foot, committed near the course of a river. However, the pieces do not quite fit together. A mysterious inscription (on one of the feet it reads "cattle") could hold the key to everything.
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