alex the commandant camille verhoeven trilogy

One sees his job as keeping Verhoeven calm. He has strained relations with all his co-workers and with his boss. Can he handle this kidnapping case? His mother recently died and he’s having a hard time dealing with that.

His wife died four years ago and he was so stricken he was institutionalized for a year. He’s an artist and constantly sketches the victim, looking for something. He’s 4-feet 11-inches tall and we hear frequently how people react to his short stature and how his legs dangle off chairs. By the start of Part 3 a lot of the main characters are dead and you wonder, how is the author going to keep this going? He does a good job of it. In Part 1 we have a victim who we learn in Part 2 is also a victimizer. There are two things that make this book a bit unique among police procedurals. She escapes pretty quickly in an ingenious way. At first I thought “these cage scenes will get tiring and repetitive.” I was reminded of another mystery I read where a woman was locked in some kind of decompression chamber and we had to read about her ordeal dozens of times through the whole book. The books start with chapters alternating between what the woman is undergoing and how the detective is trying to find her. Will hunger, thirst, or the rats get her first? Her abductor appears to want only to watch her die. Alex of the title is a young woman who has been kidnapped, savagely beaten, and suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a tiny wooden cage.

I’ll work from the book blurb so I don’t give away more than necessary. This book (#2 in the series) is rated 4.1 with thousands of reviews – that’s quite high by GR standards. This French author has a good police procedural series going: Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven.

Alex the commandant camille verhoeven trilogy