The Blue Room by Georges Simenon

First published in France in 1963; published in translation in the UK by Penguin Classics on January 1, 2015; Penguin Classics U.S. digital edition forthcoming in 2016

Tense and surprising, The Blue Room is the account of a man named Tony who is being interrogated and will soon be brought to trial for a crime. For most of the novel, the reader is uncertain of the crime's victim and of Tony's guilt or innocence.

What the reader does learn is that Tony had an affair with the grocer's wife, that the grocer's wife was deeply in love with Tony, and that Tony was careless in the way he responded to the woman's affections. When he answers "of course" to the question "Would you like to spend the rest of your life with me?" he does not realize that his offhand remark, tossed out without a moment's thought, will have profound implications. It is a moment that returns to haunt his memory again and again throughout the course of the brief novel.

Georges Simenon was a master of psychological suspense. In the spare prose of a defeated man -- defeated by life, defeated by himself -- Tony examines his life, ponders the interrogator's questions, and never quite manages to voice his inevitable regret. Simenon creates a vivid sense of place (even of the blue hotel room in which Tony and the grocer's wife make love), captures the textures and scents of the world, and makes each character meaningful.

The Blue Room is a haunting novel that teaches powerful lessons. The crime(s), once revealed, are less important than the real crime -- to act for one's own pleasure, to speak without thinking, without regard to the consequences that selfish acts and words have upon others, and ultimately, upon oneself.

RECOMMENDED

Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne

Published in France in 2005; published in translation by Le French Book on March 25, 2015

The connection between the Nazi party and the occult is one that fiction writers continue to exploit, although rarely in a way that might be considered fresh. Freemasons, their predecessors in the Knights Templar, and Nazis are standard ingredients in these stories. So are ritual killings, plenty of which occur in Shadow Ritual.

Francois Le Guermand, having fled France in 1940 with other refugees of the German invasion, by 1945 has become a trusted SS officer. Together with Nazi officers, Le Guermand is selected to membership in an ancient Aryan secret society, Thule-Gesellshaft. To carry on Hitler's work, he is charged with burying some crates and disappearing into a clandestine life. That plan is foiled by the Russian advance, which causes Le Guermand to disappear in a way he had not planned.

In 2005, a concentration camp survivor, now pursuing archeology in Jerusalem, is asked to authenticate a fragment from a stone tablet called the Tebah Stone. Bashir Al Khansa (a/k/a "the Emir") wants to gain possession of the stone on behalf of a mysterious client. A couple of other professional killers join the fun -- a Palestinian and a Croatian -- and of course there is a character whose hobbies are gardening and torture. Ritual killings in Jerusalem and Rome fuel investigations by the police and others, including both Freemasons and, um, non-Freemasons. Our primary good guys are a male and female who are so forgettable I can't recall much about them. The killings and Stone stealing have something to do with a ritual and "a secret lost in antiquity" that will lead to "the power of the gods," all of which is even sillier than most novels about Freemasons and Nazis.

History lessons that readers of similar novels will have encountered before dominate the book's first half. Much of the history is so well known (not just to thriller readers) that it acts as a drag on the story while adding little of value. At times, Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne seem to have been attempting a philosophical novel, but they are no Camus.

Unfortunately, the novel just doesn't work at any level. The clichéd plot is carried by trite characters. The prose sometimes relies on phrases like "It's us against them. Evil is lurking ..." but most of it time it's fine. Sadly, the story isn't. I've read the story before and this novel provided no reason for me to want to read it yet again.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Shiro Project by David Khara

Published in France in 2011; published in translation by Le French Book on November 18, 2014

The Shiro Project begins with the release of a weaponized virus in a Maryland laboratory in 1957, then jumps to the Czech Republic in 2011 where the residents of a village are all dead. After that we go to the Israeli Embassy in Brussels to learn the story of Eytan Morg, a genetically modified Mossad agent who made his debut in The Bleiberg Project. Eytan spent most of his life capturing or killing escaped Nazis, but since there is not much point in chasing octogenarians, he has more recently devoted himself to a secret society called Consortium. The group is dedicated to creating a master race of superior beings who might even be superior to Eytan. To his surprise, Eytan he finds himself coerced into working with Consortium against a common enemy.

Flashback chapters fill us in on Eytan's past while chapters set in the present team Eytan with a Consortium agent named Elena who is Eytan's genetically-enhanced counterpart. When Elena isn't trying to kill Eytan, she admires and even wants to bed him. Such is the nature of the fickle heart.

The evildoers that occupy Eytan and Elena have their genesis in Unit 731, a covert agency of the Japanese government that experimented with chemical and biological warfare in China before and during World War II. Nefarious Pentagon conspirators also play a role.

The story is intelligent, drawing upon history to create credible villains, although the villains seem dated. The story is also a bit wooden, a description that applies equally to the protagonist. Eytan's egocentric attitude (people "believe in nothing" because they do not share his passion for his cause) is occasionally overbearing, but most of the time he's a reasonably likeable hero. We are told that Eytan "saw the value in each life he took." As sensitive killers go, Eytan is stuffy, more likely to deliver lectures than violence. His genetic programming apparently did not include a sense of humor.

Fortunately, the novel is more fun than Eytan. It delivers a satisfying amount of action, moves at a brisk pace, and leads to a pleasing (albeit predictable) resolution.

RECOMMENDED

Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on April 29, 2014

Ludevic Senechal buys an old film from the son of a man who recently died. The film's former owner was obsessed by espionage and conspiracy stories. As Senechal watches the film, he goes blind. By chance, he speed dials the number of a Lucie Henebelle, a police lieutenant he dated for a short time. When Lucie watches the movie, she almost wishes she had gone blind instead of seeing the gruesome footage. But, as Lucie eventually discovers, there is more to the film than meets the eye ... or the conscious mind.

While Lucie is investigating the movie, Chief Inspector Sharko is lending his assistance as a behavioral analyst to provincial police who are investigating five dead bodies -- their skulls sawed open, hands chopped-off, brains and eyes removed -- that have been found buried in Upper Normandy. Sharko's efforts are hampered by Eugenie, a young woman who blames him for a certain traumatic event in his life. Eugenie is not real but the treatment Sharko is receiving for paranoid schizophrenia hasn't made his tormenter go away. Why Sharko is allowed to carry a gun is a bit of a mystery but perhaps delusions and schizophrenia do not disqualify police officers from carrying lethal weapons in France.

The two mysteries are, of course, linked, and so the two protagonists, Lucie and Sharko, are fated to meet. Their relationship proceeds in a way that is too obvious, but given that this novel is followed by a sequel, perhaps their relationship will take a less predictable path in the next installment.

Soon after they meet, Sharko travels to Cairo to investigate similar murders that occurred 16 years earlier while Lucie's investigation takes her to Canada. Franck Thilliez captures the rhythms of Cairo and Montreal as convincingly as those of his native France. The story relies upon a dark period in the history of Quebec involving the "Dupleissis orphans," a scheme that allowed church-operated orphanages to obtain government funding by falsely certifying orphaned children as mentally ill. Eventually a conspiracy is revealed that, in the tradition of modern thriller conspiracies, is far-fetched but (unlike some modern thrillers) at least remotely plausible. The notion underlying the "syndrome" that gives the book its title is fanciful but not without a scientific foundation.

Once Lucie and Sharko uncover the killer's identity, Lucie is shocked, but I doubt the reader will be. My reaction was "oh," simply because there is no way for the reader to have made the discovery independently. The information dump that ends the story comes as an anti-climax. Despite the disappointing ending, I enjoyed the character of Sharko and will probably read the next novel in the series.

RECOMMENDED

Malavita by Tonino Benacquista

First published in France in 2004; published in translation by Penguin Books on June 25, 2013

If, like most viewers, you were wondering "what comes next?" after the screen turned black at the end of the last Sopranos episode, you can imagine Malavita as the Sopranos sequel. Unfortunate events forced the Blake family to leave Newark, and then to leave Paris, and then to leave the Cote d'Azur before making their way to a village in Normandy. Along the way they were joined by an Australian Cattle Dog named Malavita. The cause of their journey is not revealed until chapter two, but the reader knows that it has something to do with Fred, "in the days when he was still called Giovanni." Having come into possession of a typewriter, Fred is posing as a writer, a cover story that disturbs both his wife Maggie (who regards her husband as barely literate) and, after Fred decides he should write his memoir, his exasperated FBI handler. The writing exposes Fred's checkered past to the reader while dredging up a sense of vulnerability that Fred has rarely experienced.

The Blakes are a family of sociopaths. Young Warren's ambition is to become a Godfather while his aptly named sister Belle guards her untouchable beauty with violent vigor. Maggie might burn down your house as retribution for a perceived insult, but her French neighbors revere her as a volunteer for charitable causes. Fred is widely regarded as a worldly pack leader, a community protector. Near the story's midpoint, Tonino Benacquista treats the reader to a departure, a series of short stories connected by a school newspaper. The circuitous route traveled by the newspaper turns out to be integral to the plot, but the stories are enjoyable standing alone.

Benacquista keeps the tone light, making it possible for the tolerant reader to like the Blakes, just as viewers liked Tony Soprano while cringing at his behavior. Fred is who he is, and Benacquista helps the reader understand why. Benacquista's approach to storytelling makes it possible to step back from the criminal nature of the Blake family and to look beneath the surface to find traits and circumstances with which the reader can identify. Crime families, after all, have the same domestic issues as other families. In fact, we understand Fred better than Fred -- a man baffled by honest people who "trust in a world that had to be obeyed" -- understands us. And even if we can't identify with Belle's narcissism or Warren's lust for power or Fred's indifference to his family (although he cares about his dog, so how bad can he be?), those characteristics (exaggerated for comedic effect but recognizable in people we know) can make us laugh.

Malavita exposes the hypocrisy of people who make a point of holding themselves out as morally superior to (or holier than) the wayward Blakes. Which is worse, the novel implicitly asks: the Mafia kingpin or the factory owners who poison the village water supply? French pomposity, Italian appetites, and American arrogance all add humor to Benacquista's story. By the novel's end, Fred is redeemed in a small but meaningful way. Malavita doesn't have the depth of character that The Sopranos developed, but it tells a funny, fast-moving story without wasting words. That made it worthwhile for me.

RECOMMENDED