BED OF NAILS

Verenne’s seamy debut takes you on a tour of the parts of Paris most tourists never see. Lucky them.

Lt. Richard Guérin heads the Suicides division of the Paris police force. Assisted by a crew whose idea of a good time is to watch a video of a young man throwing himself under a truck, he does his best to find out why, and whether, people chose to bring their lives to an end in the City of Light. The latest corpse to fall under his purview is Alan Mustgrave, a fakir whose act made him stand out from other cabaret performers: Night after night, he’d take the stage of Le Caveau de la Bolée and pierce his skin with needles and knives, until the night he went too far even for an audience who’d acquired a taste for Grand Guignol. When Guérin meets John Nichols, the young psychologist who’s come from America to claim his old friend’s body, the two men compare notes and find that Alan’s been a long time dying. He served in Iraq, where he learned more about torture than most people would ever want to know. Then he was recruited for hush-hush government work. The last time John saw him, heroin was already eating Alan alive, and his affair with American embassy secretary Frank Hirsh did nothing to put the roses back in his cheeks. But an eyewitness account of a telltale blonde woman and two men lurking nearby suggests that his death, so obviously a suicide, may be part of a larger, darker pattern.

Varenne creates characters more compelling than his plot. Readers who hang in till the final page, however, will be rewarded with an almost unbearably sad ending.