Irene - Couverture souple

"Last year I raved about Lemaitre’s first published crime novel Alex, but this second - which was, in fact, the first he wrote, as it introduces his detective, Commandant Verhoeven - is even better. Quirky, brutal and not for the faint-hearted, it is crime fiction of the highest class . . . Superbly constructed and executed, it puts Lemaitre very close to Ellroy’s class. If you pick it up, you won’t be able to put it down."—Geoffery Wansell, Daily Mail

"Irène is compulsive reading . . . The narrative is fast-paced and the suspense unbearably taut." —Thuy On, The Sidney 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