“For Commandant Camille Verhoeven life is beautiful. He is happily married and soon to become a father.
But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. When his team discovers that the killer has form—and each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel—the Parisian press are quick to coin a nickname . . . The Novelist.
With the public eye fixed on both hunter and hunted, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell bent on outsmarting the other. There can only be one winner. The one who has the least to lose.”
"Irène is compulsive reading . . . The narrative is fast-paced and the suspense unbearably taut.” —The Sydney Morning Herald
”Pierre Lemaitre's Alex earned rave reviews last year, not least for the way Lemaitre reworked the tropes of the conventional serial-killer novel to create a clever police procedural that worked as a superb thriller even as it confounded readers' expectations of the genre. The follow-up, Irène, is equally clever, as the diminutive Parisian detective Camille Verhoeven is initially confronted with a murder scene so horrific that it puts him in mind of Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son.” ―Irish Times
(A special thank you to book club member, Penny Stephens for the suggestion.)