Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Published by Minotaur Books on March 10, 2015

This is the second novel I've read that focuses on the horror story of Quebec's Duplessis orphanage, which was turned into an asylum because the church could collect more government funds by pretending that the orphans were mentally ill. Orphans were given experimental drug treatments and were abused in other ways. Building upon that real-life tragedy, Jeanette De Beauvoir concocts a plot involving a CIA-backed program to conduct experiments of a different nature. The nature of the CIA's nefarious dealings are the ordinary stuff of thrillers, plowing ground that is no longer fertile, but other aspects of De Beauvoir's story have greater value.

Martine LeDuc works for Montreal's mayor, running the city's public relations department. Montreal is in need of some good PR, given the four women have been killed in the city, apparently at random. LeDuc is assigned to act as liaison between the mayor and the chief of police, neither of whom like her. A detective, unpopular because he is Anglo rather than Franco, is assigned to babysit LeDuc. Naturally they work together to find the killer despite the absence of the words "criminal investigation" in Martine's job description.

The murder victims were all raped and mutilated, their bodies left left sitting upright on park benches. Their ages, appearances, and occupations are varied. Fans of serial killer novels know that discovering the connection between the victims is the key to catching the killer. That's a reliable crime novel formula but it is not put to good use here. The motivation for the murders is far-fetched and contrived. I didn't buy it.

LeDuc is given a stepmother's hectic home life that helps establish her personality, but some of the domestic scenes are mundane. The Montreal setting is used to nice effect as the reader is taken on a tour of the neighborhoods where the victims lived and the parks where their bodies were discovered. Simple French words like bon and alors constantly crop up in an apparent reminder that people speak French in Montreal, but since the rest of their dialog is in English, the frequent appearances of "first year French" are silly.

Italicized sections of the novel are told in the first person by Gabrielle, who was abandoned in an orphanage after being born to an unmarried woman who experienced a "moral lapse." The nuns who raised her later transferred her to Duplessis. Gabrielle's story is not as emotionally affecting as it was probably meant to be.

LeDuc finds herself threated by the killer toward the novel's end but (1) that section of the novel is too predictable to generate suspense and (2) since the killer should know that LeDuc has blabbed her suspicions about him to pretty much the whole world, killing LeDuc would be an act of supreme idiocy. The lengthy talkfest that follows, as the killer explains himself, is just dull.

I liked De Beauvoir's prose style. There are aspects of the novel that make for enjoyable reading, but the predictable ending, the failure to generate tension, and the far-fetched plot lead to disappointment by the novel's end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS