Camille by Pierre LeMaitre

This was a book I picked up from those little depositories we find around our locality with free books. Usually, I find nothing but something about this one interested me and I gave it a go. Unfortunately, I started it and read the first 30 pages or so and then didn’t get the opportunity to pick it up again for a while. I tried to continue but I couldn’t make sense of it so I started it again. Good move! I had alas, chosen to pause at a very crucial part of the story and once I go passed that I really enjoyed this crime thriller, which I have only recently discovered is part of a series. Clearly, the other books are not necessary for this book does stand on its own two feet. Originally written in French, it tells of a detective, Camille who investigates a robbery on a jeweller’s shop in which his ‘girlfriend’ is brutally assaulted. The book covers just three days and rather than chapters the punctuation comes from us knowing the day and the time of this bit of the book. The thing that threw me when I paused reading it was that the next section was then written in the first person. It didn’t relate to what I had read but that is because the story weaves two strands, one from Camille and the other from a person who we do not know, hence only revealed in ‘I’ from those sections. It is fairly fast paced and the 320 pages are just three days. And as you might expect in a crime novel, there are some good twists and turns that make it very entertaining if this is your kind of thing. I enjoyed it thoroughly and my hat goes off to the translator!

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