Fred Vargas

Nei boschi eterni

    (Dans le bois éternels  //  This Night’s Foul Work)

Einaudi, 2008 (2006)    [novels, Ita, I3]

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The ghost of a nun who lived in the eighteenth century and killed cutting her victims’ throat doesn’t scare superintendent Adamsberg, but all other things do.

It is a heavy-laden and dry novel, and a fiendishly perfect plot, set in an esoteric France, with gloomy and very vivid beliefs.

Without warning, superintendent Adamsberg falls in a world that looks reverted to Middle Ages, where deers are broken in the Norman forests, virgins’ corpses are outraged to take spooky matters out of them, and magic potions ensure unending life, at the cost of ghastly crimes. While a rival from his farthest past who is talking verse plans to steal him everything. It looks like an inextricable jig saw, aimed to make anybody out of his mind. Anybody but a «cloud scavenger» as Adamsberg is. In spite of the fact that, once more, reaching the truth will ask for tearing away a piece of his own heart...

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I’m not fond of crime novels, and I wouldn’t have probably read this one either, hadn’t it been a birthday gift from a good friend of mine.

However, having had the opportunity, I’ve enjoyed the time I spent on this book: the story is enthralling, the characters are true to life and well depicted, the ambience has some kind of magic which adds involvement, and though persuaded to be on the right track, in the end I was completely caught out by a conclusion which I hadn’t ben able to picture.